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The first step to making great beer is to start with great ingredients.
You only really need four main ingredients: brewers' grains, water, hops
and yeast.
Malted barley is the main brewers' grain. The malting of the barley
is the only part of the process that we don't directly control ourselves
- rather, we buy the grains in already malted from our maltsters.
The maltsters take green grains from the fields and steep them for several
days to stimulate their germination. Once the germination has reached
the right stage, the grains are then dried with warm or hot air, to stabilise
them to be shipped to the brewery. This drying process can be extended
- with hotter air or longer drying times - to not just dry the grains,
but toast or roast them.
In this way, our maltsters can offer us a variety of different malted
barleys - all from the same grains, but germinated for longer (e.g. crystal
malt) or roasted more thoroughly (e.g. chocolate malt).
We bring the malted grains (mainly barley, but a little malted wheat for
body and mouthfeel) to the brewery as whole grains, ensuring that they
stay as fresh as possible. This means that the first part of the
process at the brewery is milling these grains. The mill, pictured
at the bottom, cracks the grains roughly in half, so that we can get at
the starches and sugars inside the husk.
The red auger (emerging from the brewer's armpit in the photo!) then pulls
the cracked grains (now called "grist") up into the grist case
above the mash tun ready for the brew to commence.
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