This is a great forum. I've been lurking for a while and thought I would introduce myself. (There's an actual question below, honest.)
I'm preparing to open a cottage brewery here in Dublin, Ireland, making 1,440 hL in year one, and 2,880 hL in year two. With our Draconian tax and regulatory situations, the only way I can get this off to a decent start is by working single-handedly for two years (my wife will provide administrative support, however). I'll start with three 10-hL fermenters, a 10-hL mash tun/boiler, a couple of 10-hL utility tanks, then double the fermenters in the second year. The rest of the kit will be functional but minimal. A decent pump, plate chiller, wort aerator, etc, etc. To maintain flow, I'll have to filter (not aggressively) and force carbonate. I have some strategies for preventing much harm from those procedures. Everyone in IE wants bright, kegged beer.
There is almost no craft brewing here, and very little import of interesting beers from overseas, because the duty situation makes it difficult to make money. Pretty much everything drunk here is mass market stuff from Diageo, Heineken, and InBev, whose economies of capital and scale give them the edge they need. There is a chain of microbrewery / brew pubs with a nice menu of interesting house beers and a fab menu of exotic imports, but they cater to tourists. Your Dublin local pub is basically Guinness, Heineken, and Smithwick's.
So my approach is to make *better* but not *different* beer, and not compete for attention among tourists who are already well served. (Wish me luck.)
With that out of the way, here's my question: we all know that scaling recipes never quite works. I'm doing 50-L batches and I've got three candidates for production: a blond Pilsner-ish ale, a classic Irish red ale, and a dry stout. (I'll leave the task of educating local drinkers to craft brewers who are independently wealthy.) But I've been doing this long enough to know that if I simply multiply everything by 20, it's not going to taste the same. I wonder if anyone has anecdotal info to share: which ingredients have you found need to be increaed or decreased when scaling?
Good Lord, I do go on sometimes.
I'm preparing to open a cottage brewery here in Dublin, Ireland, making 1,440 hL in year one, and 2,880 hL in year two. With our Draconian tax and regulatory situations, the only way I can get this off to a decent start is by working single-handedly for two years (my wife will provide administrative support, however). I'll start with three 10-hL fermenters, a 10-hL mash tun/boiler, a couple of 10-hL utility tanks, then double the fermenters in the second year. The rest of the kit will be functional but minimal. A decent pump, plate chiller, wort aerator, etc, etc. To maintain flow, I'll have to filter (not aggressively) and force carbonate. I have some strategies for preventing much harm from those procedures. Everyone in IE wants bright, kegged beer.
There is almost no craft brewing here, and very little import of interesting beers from overseas, because the duty situation makes it difficult to make money. Pretty much everything drunk here is mass market stuff from Diageo, Heineken, and InBev, whose economies of capital and scale give them the edge they need. There is a chain of microbrewery / brew pubs with a nice menu of interesting house beers and a fab menu of exotic imports, but they cater to tourists. Your Dublin local pub is basically Guinness, Heineken, and Smithwick's.
So my approach is to make *better* but not *different* beer, and not compete for attention among tourists who are already well served. (Wish me luck.)
With that out of the way, here's my question: we all know that scaling recipes never quite works. I'm doing 50-L batches and I've got three candidates for production: a blond Pilsner-ish ale, a classic Irish red ale, and a dry stout. (I'll leave the task of educating local drinkers to craft brewers who are independently wealthy.) But I've been doing this long enough to know that if I simply multiply everything by 20, it's not going to taste the same. I wonder if anyone has anecdotal info to share: which ingredients have you found need to be increaed or decreased when scaling?
Good Lord, I do go on sometimes.
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