BrewDog Shares Stories of Growing Pains in New Brewhouse

BrewDog of Scotland recently expanded operations to Ellon Scotland, and with their investment money, bought some shiny new nice equipment. Here are some excerpts from the tales of breaking in (literally) new brewhouse equipment, and what we have to look forward to this year (hopefully).

We bit the bullet and invested heavily in amazing equipment in our new brewery. It was an expensive bullet to bite (thanks for the help Equity Punks and HSBC bank!) but we wanted to have equipment that enabled us to make the best, most flavoursome beer possible.

From our Rolec Brew-House (also used by Stone, Brooklyn & Lagunitas), our state of the art centrifuge so that we can completely avoid filtration, to a patented ‘Hop Cannon’ we developed, everything at the new brewery is focussed on making completely awesome beers. And that is pretty much all we care about. However, it has not been all plain sailing in 2013.

The first issues we had at the very start of 2013 were with our new centrifuge: Using a centrifuge to completely forgo filtration was always going to be a challenge with our sky high hopping rates (we totally broke our trial centrifuge in 2012!). In January we ended up completely choking our new one several times and loosing loads of beer. Some batch yields were as low as 50% – owch! To make matters worse, as the centrifuge tried in vain to dump the excess of hops we flooded it with, the beer was exposed to oxygen and consequently many of the beers had high oxygen content which meant more destroyed beers and a few rogue bottles that made their way out to the market unfortunately.

Read the entire story over at BrewDog’s Official Website, and stay tuned for the completion of their 2013 Expansion initiative.
http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/the-good-the-bad-and-the-hazy