Half Moon Brewing has been conveniently located beneath the same stairway since its founding in 1698, a site now under consideration for the National Register of Historic Places, and considered even more remarkable because the house was only built in 1870. A simple peg board holds hoses, counter-pressure bottler, racking canes, and a NIOSH approved half face dust mask (the brewmaster has asthma and wants to avoid dust while milling the malted grain), and the original flourescent light still works. There is also a shelf to the left that holds the hydrometer, assorted stoppers, and other sundry brewing materials. It is a convenient place to store stuff. Actually, all the mashing and boiling takes place upstairs in the kitchen.
Half Moon Brewing has just started culturing its own yeast, and has assembled most of the requisite materials. This includes slants, innoculating loop, and alcohol burner for sterilization. General procedures follow those suggested by Dave Draper (Culturing Yeast and Using Slants), and it seems to be working well. I guess the urge to collect more brewing equipment and control even more of the brewing process never stops.
All the malts are purchased uncrushed, and are stored in a metal trash can (it was new when I started using it, really!). The base malt typically is a Belgian Pilsner Malt.
I considered buying a special malt mill, but had an old coffee mill that my grandfather somehow had acquired from an old A&P store and had been keeping in his basement for years (before my parents kept it in their basement for years). It seems to do a good job of crushing the grain, is fast, and was free. It did take a few batches with stuck sparges to get the grind correct, however.
The heart of beermaking is the mash- adding water to crushed malted grains, and using precise temperature control to allow (encourage) enzymes to convert the grains' starches into fermentable sugars.
Half Moon Brewing uses a modified 5 gallon Gott cooler for mashing. In the bottom of the cooler is a spiral of copper tubing connected to the spout, with slits cut into it to allow liquid to drain from the cooler without also draining any of the grains. I drilled a small hole in the very center of the lid to allow a long bimetal thermometer to extend down into the mash (purchased from Williams Brewing, in California). It extends a good half way down into the cooler, so lets me monitor the temperature without removing the lid.
Most mashes are done with a protein rest around 130 degrees, reached by mixing water slightly above that temperature with the grains. Raising the mash temperature to starch conversion temperatures (generally 140-160) is done using steam infusion- I modified an old pressure cooker by adding another outlet with a long copper tube and a valve. To raise mash temperatures, I bring the pressure cooker to boil at 15 psi, insert the tube into the mash, and then open the valve. This raises the temperature about 1-2 degrees a minute.
When the mash is finished (i.e. all the starches are converted to sugar, usually taking an hour or two), the liquid is slowly drained off into a large kettle. Additional hot water (168 degrees) is slowly poured through the mash until about 6-7 gallons of liquid are collected. This "sparging" process is done using a Phils Sparger and a second Gott cooler. I drilled a hole through the lid of the second cooler and inserted the sparger through it. When I sparge, I swap the lids between the first and second coolers and hook up the sparger. The second cooler helps keep the sparge water at 168 degrees.
The collected liquid is then boiled for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Hops are added during the boil, depending upon the recipe. Once boiling is finished, the liquid is cooled with an immersion wort cooler- essentially a 50 foot loop of copper tubing through which cold tap water is run. At this stage the beer is called "wort."
After boiling, the wort is cooled to 60 some degrees, has yeast added, and is aerated with an aquarium pump. It is then placed in the Half Moon Fermentation Box, which is a temperature control fermenting chamber. The box ain't pretty on the outside because it was made from some spare plywood left in my barn, but it works.
The box is just a plywood box, big enough to hold two carboys, lined with 2 inch thick styrofoam insulation, and attached to Half Moon Brewing's spare refrigerator. An old computer fan draws air into the fermenter from the refrigerator through one 2 inch hole, while a second hole allows the air to circulate back into the refrigerator. Both holes are lined with 2 inch pvc pipe. An indoor/outdoor thermometer (intended for cars) allows me to monitor air temperature without opening the box.
The box works very well; with the fan off, the temperature averages around 63 degrees (good for ales), and with it running full time the box is around 48 degrees (perfect for lagers). The fan originally was controlled by a digital household thermostat, but one cold day winter day when our furnace's thermostat stopped working, I pulled it out to replace the one upstairs. I never replaced the thermostat in the box because I discovered that simply leaving it on, or leaving it off, gave me good lager and ale fermentation temperatures, respectively.
The idea for this is not original- Geoff Scott's (Geoff 's Brewing) very good website gave me the idea, and he was gracious enough to answer a few email questions from me as well.
I did add one flourish to the box. I added a hatch in the top to make it easier to siphon beer from the primary fermenter into the secondary, and into kegs. I can open the hatch, insert a racking cane and siphon hose directly into a carboy without moving the carboy. The box is set above the floor enough to allow me to siphon directly into a carboy setting on the floor, meaning that I can siphon without having to move the carboy, and thus get much less sediment carried into the new carboy. The box is just a little too low for siphoning into cornelius kegs, but a few 2X4's placed under the secondary seems to be high enough.
Anyway, this is fermentation underway (actually not a good picture to use because its a weizen (ale yeast) I had fermenting under the stairs because at that time in the fermenter I already had a pilsner working away at 48 degrees... and that is way too cold for ale yeast.)
Next stop for the beer... the lagering refrigerator, where lagers sit for at least a month before being tapped. Ales are tapped within two weeks.