Glycol – Brewhouse Issues

Hello beer friends! This has been a packed week at Cellarmaker. It was the final week of construction and we have entered our last stage of permitting. I was leading many projects this week and although I was working long days I came out of it with a huge sense of gratification. Some of the stuff we did this week were:

• Clean and rinse out the hundreds of feet of glycol lines.
• Fill the Glycol Chiller on the roof with glycol. We didn’t have a pump/hose combination that could pump 55 gallons that far of a distance so it turned out to be back breaking work lugging 2 buckets of 2.5 gallons of glycol (heavier than water) up stairs and a ladder 11 times. I then had to scoop the glycol out with a smaller bucket because there isn’t enough space above the reservoir to just pour in from the larger bucket. And it was really freaking hot in SOMA that day.
• Fire up the glycol chiller and get the cold storage room cold.
• Finish installing the keg lines and draft set-up (Thank you Chad).
• Install the auger which brings the milled grain up to the mash tun.
• Troubleshoot the brewhouse control panel which is still not correct…

And so on and so forth. With all that done we finally felt safe to order 800lbs of hops and enough grain for our first four beers!

I’m about to head in now to double check that our glycol is flowing through the fermenters properly and without leaks. I should be at Cellarmaker all next week so feel free to stop in, say hi, and check out San Francisco’s next hot thang!

-Tim