August 11 Visit To Speidel Microbrewery In Memmingen, Munich

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

All being well, I'm going to treat myself to one in the new year. It will be available in the shop for all to use (maybe on Saturdays by appointment, tba). All I ask is that you use our ingredients and leave a few beers to cover the running costs !

There is a place in London (Brixton) that is doing this kind of service: http://londonbeerlab.com/

They have a few braumeisters, and run a business doing courses, where people are shown how to make their own beer on their equipment. These kind of ticketed events seem to be popping up in a lot of places, and there are plenty of other unusual collaborations going on. Our club has been involved in a few ventures, where they make the beer in a small brewery, which then gets sold.

Best of luck with it.

[Padraic]

All being well, I'm going to treat myself to one in the new year. It will be available in the shop for all to use (maybe on Saturdays by appointment, tba). All I ask is that you use our ingredients and leave a few beers to cover the running costs !

There is a place in London (Brixton) that is doing this kind of service: http://londonbeerlab.com/

They have a few braumeisters, and run a business doing courses, where people are shown how to make their own beer on their equipment. These kind of ticketed events seem to be popping up in a lot of places, and there are plenty of other unusual collaborations going on. Our club has been involved in a few ventures, where they make the beer in a small brewery, which then gets sold.

Best of luck with it.

That looks great, I was thinking of setting up a similar business here, but was put off the idea by people telling me that if people were fermenting the beer on site that it might be illegal...

I'd love to have this sort of workshop available in Ireland!

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

url=http://londonbeerlab.com/]http://londonbeerlab.com/[/url]

They have a few braumeisters, and run a business doing courses, where people are shown how to make their own beer on their equipment. These kind of ticketed events seem to be popping up in a lot of places, and there are plenty of other unusual collaborations going on. Our club has been involved in a few ventures, where they make the beer in a small brewery, which then gets sold.

Best of luck with it.

That looks great, I was thinking of setting up a similar business here, but was put off the idea by people telling me that if people were fermenting the beer on site that it might be illegal...

I'd love to have this sort of workshop available in Ireland!

Like all things seek out good legal advice. I would recommend that you do not ferment on site, but that you sell the ingredients, and allow the customers to take the hopped wort home, same day, to ferment it themselves. That means you are not providing them with beer, and therefore are not doing anything that requires a license, bond etc.

I think it is a sound business model - cook the wort on site using good equipment, immediately available expertise, and readily available ingredients. Dependable brew day, possibility of selling 'vouchers' or the like.

[HomeBrewWest]

If you are brewing in bulk, you are buying in bulk. Your malt bill goes way down when you buy it on pallets (~1000Kg).

Hops go way down too when you buy them in 5Kg bags.

My figures are all based on what a micro brewery pays. I think I've been involved in group buys of around 10 tonnes of malt, and around 140Kg of hops. Malt direct from the maltings and hops from the hop factors.

Turns out most (if not all?) microbreweries in Ireland use infusion mashing systems; step mashing systems like the Speidel are much efficient.

[HomeBrewWest]

True, for British real ales (and lots of others) made from highly modified grains, the extra yield from step mashing is indeed  limited. You can sparge though, and some Speidel micros do it . . . but I'll need to ask Speidel exactly how this is done (presumably you can just use the built in pump to run hot water through the grain column). An advantage of programmable mash temps is that you can raise the temp at the end . . . this not only affects enzymes, it also makes the sugars more soluble and "free flowing" so that lots more wort drains from the spent grain. Maybe this is why they don't normally sparge, again I'll have to ask Speidel.

Here is a quote (re. step mashing) from http://byo.com/stories/item/1474-the-best-mash-program
". . . since a wider variety of enzymes can be brought into play at their optimal temperatures, mash efficiency (the percentage of sugars from the grain that make it into the wort) usually improves. As a result, the degree of modification of the grains is not as critical, and hence a wider variety and quality of grains can be used. "

I suppose the primary advantages for Speidel micros are:
- repeatability (this is the key advantage in my opinion, it comes from more precise mash temperature control and pumping the wort through the grain continually),
- they offer more control of the mashing process,
- immune from stuck mashes,
- less labor required as most of the process is automated,
- they take up less space as everything happens in a single vessel,
- centrifugal pump action means you can use hop pellets without the need for hop filters.

Plus all the other features. They are not much more expensive that the basic infusion systems that are quite common in micros here and in the UK. I rekon you'd save the additional costs quickly with time saved. In addition to running the Speidel, there is lots happening on brew day:
- cleaning kegs,
- filling kegs or bottles,
- cleaning fermenters,
- moving kegs / bottles to cold rooms,
- etc. etc.
So if a Speidel frees you up do do all these tasks while it is running, you will save a lot of time.

[HomeBrewWest]

Some very interesting information from Speidel this morning: many microbreweries do indeed sparge, but its a very simple process. For example, for a 500 litre unit, they often just use a cold water hose to spray 60 to 70 litres of cold water over the mash tube after it has been raised. Very simple and it allows them to collect up to 10% extra full gravity wort. Since the unit is already heating up for the boil, very little time is lost heating up this small amount of colder water. Overall, its much quicker than other systems because there is no need to move the wort between containers. This shortens the brewing process. So much so, that's it possible to do a second batch on the same day (a long day . . . 10 hours or more).

In relation to step mashing, it turns out its very important for achieving the banana notes in wheat beers. Its also important for many other European beer styles including October beers, lagers and pilsners. I think its only a matter of time before microbreweries here start producing lagers. It just requires the additional investment in high pressure storage tanks or additional kegs, and a large cold room of course.

The last piece of interesting information from Speidel today is that their units are typically more energy efficient because all the work is done in a single vessel, and they use as little as 5 litres of water to produce 1 litre of beer.

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

The last piece of interesting information from Speidel today is that their units are typically more energy efficient because all the work is done in a single vessel, and they use as little as 5 litres of water to produce 1 litre of beer.

Most of that water is cooling correct?

Theres a brew pub in north london that has outstanding water efficiency - about 90% + of all the water used ends up as beer. They use a heat exchanger on the chiller, to remove the heat and use it to heat the pub and the upstairs guesthouse.

[HomeBrewWest]

Yup, its nearly all cooling water for the chiller. I suppose you could use it to heat the building, especially in winter if you had a large enough resevoir. I'd love to do the maths on that one . . . I wish there were 10 days in a week!

Taking off my green hat and putting on the business one, I googled water charges in the UK and it seems to vary from about 0.2 to 0.3 pence per litre so the water cost seems to be fairly insignificant. I've no idea what they are here.

[Will_D]

The rugby club is metered and we are paying about €2 a cubic metre (1000 litres)

However in UK for domestic users where they meter the water, they charge you for water in, then divide that volume of water by 2 and charge you for effluent out (more expensive)

So far the .ie water charges are only afaik only for water in.

But give the fekers time

[Will_D]

I've a mate living in West Sussex. He pays for water in, effluent out and surface water out. His annual bill is in the region of £750.

Q.E.D.

[HomeBrewWest]

Businesses here can get flat rate water, or can be metered, at the customer's choice.

A much more efficient use of cooling water is to capture it and keep it in a well insulated hlt where it will keep its heat for the next brew. A pbc 1000 litre system will end up with a hlt full of water at 60 degrees or so, drastically reducing the energy required for the next brew.

Recovering the cooling coil heat is a valid point. But it only applies if you start the next brew before the hlt water cools. Most microbreweries don't brew continually so most of the heat is lost anyway :-(

The guys in Germany only brew once a week. So the energy that could potentially be recovered in a HLT is not significant.

Speidel systems are more energy efficient because they don't suffer the heat loss associated with moving wort from one vessel to another (many times, when you include sparging, lautering etc).

Unless you insulate all the pipes, and all the vessels, there is more heat loss overall in infusion systems.

[HomeBrewWest]

According to Speidel, the total brew time is less than 5 hours, so its actually quicker that other systems.

In fact, Speidel pride themselves in being able to outperform other systems at trade demos. They always finish up hours before the others.

Two runs are possible in a day, but its a relatively long day (circa 10 hours). Speidel also claim that their units are more energy efficient that multi tier systems because of the loss of heat during wort transfer between the vessels in those systems.