Ormeau Dark at Trouble Brewing
After months of anticipation, following Moira’s and my success at the 2013 National Homebrew Club competition, the incredible prize of brewing our own beer on a commercial scale had arrived. We woke early on a sunny Thursday 4th July and set off for Kill in the County Kildare to meet Paul O Connor, the head brewer at Trouble Brewing.
Following brief introductions and tea we headed into the brewery room where we were immediately hit by the distinctive biscuit smell of malted barley. In front of us was a large open space occupied by a series of shiny tanks, snaking flexible tubing and copper piping intermittently separated by valves. Across from the brewing setup was a huge cold room for beer conditioning and storage.
After a quick tour of the equipment we immediately got to work readying the strike water. At home this entails tallying litre jugs of hot water into a stainless steel pot, however all that was required was Moira switching on a pump and me turning a few handles before the mash tun was quickly and effortlessly filled with hot water.
Next up, the malt. Not so easy! After carting seemingly endless 25kg bags across the brewery floor to the mash tun we began the task of opening each bag. This involved a red and a white string and pulling one to release the other… or something.
Bag after bag of pale malt was then satisfyingly emptied into the mash tun, followed by the toffee-caramel crystal malt, sweet nutty dark wheat malt, Carafa II and black malt with its roasted burnt coffee aroma. Finally the porridge oats were added, which Paul happily pointed out were organic no less!
Once all the malts had been added to the mash tun Moira and I took turns in stirring the mass of water and grains as one might paddle a kayak, leaning over into the mash tun driving the paddle deep and pulling back to build up a slow swirl in the porridge-like mixture. After all the lumps are were out and a homogenous mixture had been achieved the temperature was adjusted accordingly and it was time again to relax.
A quick cup of tea was succeeded by a further tour of the fermentation vessels and cold conditioning room sampling batches of beer at various stages of fermentation. The differences were marked from the sweet cloudy, semi-fermented worts, to the sharp very young beers, to the smoother conditioned batches nearly ready for kegging.
Soon the mash time was up and we headed back to the mash tun to begin sparging and to sample the sweet black wort, delicious! The sparging arm was then set up, a helicopter style water sprinkling system designed to increase efficiency, and praying that we avoided a ‘stuck mash’ we started to sparge.
Another couple of handles were flipped, the pump was started and the black wort began to swirl into the brew kettle. As good a time as any to head to the local shop to get rolls for lunch.
After lunch, more tea and a cheeky Sabotage IPA we headed back into the brewing room where the full kettle was just coming to a rolling boil. The sparging had stopped leaving the dry grain bed and, in order to achieve a rounded experience of commercial brewing, Paul very kindly allowed us join him in shovelling 500kg of spent grains from the mash tun into bags, ready to be collected by local farmers.
Whilst fulfilling this role to the best of our ability we also started the hopping schedule, so off to the kitchen we went where huge beautifully shiny bags of hop pellets were laid out on the table. 1.5kg of Magnum pellets was weighed out and unceremoniously tipped into the boiling malt. Then the lovely lemony Bobek hops and tropical fruit, almost piney, Cascade hops and dark cocoa powder all met the same fate!
At ‘flame out’ the steam was turned off and the pump on, another couple of handles were flipped and the hoppy wort started swirling and emptying via an off-centre draining hole leaving the hop pellet sediment in the middle of the brew kettle. The hot wort was cooled through a heat exchanger, which simultaneously heated cold water pumped freshly from the well to the hot liquor tank for the next brew! The cooled wort then continued to the fermentation vessel where ‘a couple of gallons’ of yeast starter was patiently anticipating the arrival of lovely fermentable sugars.
All that remained was a quick brushing and hosing of the floors, a good scrubbing of the brew kettle, a starting gravity reading and a temperature check. We then bid our farewells, thanked Paul for the incredible experience and very gratefully received some Trouble Brewing beers and T-Shirts before heading for home.
