INTO THE BREW A Night in the Life


Burgeoning brewer documents experiences on the night shift By Sam Tierney


100 – Tonight’s going to be inter- esting. Right off the bat I’ve got a sanitizer cycle on a fermentor to shut down while fellow cellarman Jason finishes getting a Clean-in-Place (CIP) cycle going on one of our bigger outdoor tanks.


2 Photo: Kayla Coleman


Sam Tierney began his love affair with great beer while studying and traveling abroad in Europe during his junior year at UC Santa Barbara. He began homebrewing shortly after, and has since won multiple awards. Sam is a graduate of the Siebel Institute, a professional brewing school in Chicago, and he is now a brewer at Firestone Walker in Paso Robles, California.


2105 – Taste panel time. I head upstairs to find our sensory technician George ready for the night crew to do the day’s panel. Tonight is iso-amyl acetate threshold training. We’re using our blond ale as a base and we have to pick the one sample out of three that has the most iso-amyl acetate in it. This one isn’t too difficult. Immediately, the sample on the left smells like banana and juicy fruit gum. Ditto with the middle sample from the next flight. Luckily I don’t have any beer analysis to do tonight, which can throw a wrench in the rest of my schedule, so I head back down to the cellar after grabbing a Nut- ter Butter from the panel treat basket. 2130 – Jason takes off for the night and now I have to get our yeast propaga- tion tank hooked up to the fermentor we just sanitized. Next, I have to transfer the propagated hefeweizen yeast pitch in so it’s ready when the first batch is cooled in a few hours. Once I get it hooked up, I pressurize the tank and use the pressure to send the yeast into the fermentor. We propagate a new pitch of yeast for every batch of hefeweizen, so this is a fairly regular routine. After the transfer is done, I break down the hoses and hook up a compressed air hose to purge the carbon dioxide out of the tank so it can be cleaned. 2230 – Time to get the fermentor sani- tized for our next batch, Velvet Merlin. This is only our third batch of the year and I’m excited to see its return. You know fall is coming around when we trade wheat beer (Solace) for this oat- meal stout, which is a favorite of mine. I cried a little inside when the last batch from this spring finally ran out. 2300 – Oh yeah, fermentor 19 is still spinning! Time to shut down the CIP cycle, rinse that bad boy and cool it down for inspection. 2330 – Looks like the yeast prop tank is fully purged of CO2


and I can get


around to cleaning it. We have to purge tanks of CO2


detergent that we use, sodium hydroxide, reacts with CO2


10-


closed container-like tank, this will form a vacuum and likely implode the tank. Bad times. Looks like we have a bit of a problem though. After pre-rinsing with hot water to heat the tank up, I open the manway door at the top of the tank to add the detergent and find that part of the inside wall of the tank is still dry and has dried krausen on it. This is bad. I try to move the spray-ball, which is what washes the inside of the tank, and find that it won’t rotate, which explains the lack of coverage. This is a first for me and I’m starting to panic. Thankfully we have a spare in the parts cabinet and I’m able to replace the broken one and


before cleaning because the and precipitates. In a


The sensory analysis room (top) and bottom cone and diverter panel of an outdoor tank (bottom) at Firestone Walker Brewing Company


continue with the CIP cycle. 0015 – It’s almost time to mill-in the grain for the hefeweizen batch, which is coming right after this Velvet Merlin. One of our brewers, Scott, is busy on the brew-deck so I get a forklift and head back to the warehouse to get a pallet of specialty malts, pallet of wheat malt, and some rice hulls to help laut- ering. We have silos for the malts we use the most of, which are domestic pale malt, Mu- nich malt, and crystal 75 malt(capitalized?), but hefeweizen is more work because all the wheat has to be added from the bag into the grain hopper. With the silos, you just have to flip a couple switches to get the malt that you need.


0100 – I’ve got the yeast prop tank clean- ing and it’s time to jump up to the brew-deck while Scott gets some “lunch.” Looks like I’ve got a grain-out cycle to clean spent grain out of the lauter tun, a temperature-ramp in the mash tun to monitor, some wort samples to measure for sugar concentration and pH, and a hop addition to throw in. Thankfully this is a pretty laid-back spot in the brew- house schedule, so I can keep up with the CIP cycle I have going. 0130 – Now that I have both tanks clean,


it’s time to inspect them to make sure that ev- erything is good to go. For the outside tanks we open the bottom of the cone and look up inside, and sometimes I feel like I’m at the


bottom of a missile silo or something. These things can hold over 500 barrels of beer at a time.


0300 – I’ve finally got the sanitation cycle going on the yeast prop tank and I can take a break and get some lunch. Looks like every- thing should be ready to go for the morning, when we’re planning on adding a new yeast prop of our house ale strain. 0330 – We aren’t filtering today but we are transferring a batch of Reserve Porter from its fermentor to a bright tank so I get around to sanitizing the bright tank we are going to transfer into. 0430 – With the bright tank ready to go, I start setting up the transfer lines and flow me- ter so that our morning cellarman Steve can get the transfer going once he comes in. We are planning on filling the batch into firkins and kegs later in the day so we have to make sure it gets transferred early in the morning so it has time to be carbonated and given a final check before filling. 0500 – Steve is here and I fill him in on


what’s going on before doing some final ran- dom cleaning up and heading home. A busy night, but everything went smoothly besides that little spray ball malfunction. 0600 – The sun is just starting to glow be- low the eastern horizon as I get home. Time for bed.


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