|
|
|
Our brewhouse consists of four vessels - Cold and Hot Liquor Tanks contain
the water about to be transformed into beer ("liquor" is a brewer's
term for water). The Mash Tun is where the grist and the liquor
meet, and the Copper is where the resultant liquid is boiled with the
addition of hops.
So, in the first photo you can see here, we have Cold and Hot Liquor,
and the grist that we have just milled is resting in the blue grist case,
high above the Mash Tun, waiting to be used.
Mashing is the next part of the process, where the grist - the cracked
grains - are mixed with the hot liquor to form a thick, wet porridge.
This is a great part of the brewer's day: lots of steam and lots of rich
malty smells (like Horlicks or Ovaltine!).
At Atlas, our usual brew is 20 brewer's barrels, or 5,760 pints, which
means that we're filling the Mash Tun with around 600kg of grist and around
1400 litres of hot liquor.
This mixture - this two-tonne porridge! - then stands for an hour and
a half during which time the heat and moisture converts the starches in
the grist into sugars, and these sugars, together with the malt's colours
and flavours, are dissolved into the liquor. This transforms the
liquor from boring old hot water into a wonderful, thick, sweet, malty
liquid called "sweet wort".
After an hour and a half, we start to drain the sweet wort out of the
Mash Tun and into the Copper. As we do this, we gradually spray
a further 2200 litres of hot liquor onto the mash. This is a process
called "sparging", and makes sure that we wash all the goodness
we can get out of the grist.
>> NEXT
|
|
|
