Making Suds!

How to Make Beer - the Boylan Bridge way

Beer consists of four ingredients: hops, barley, yeast, and water.

The Boylan Bridge Brewpub subscribes to green concepts that are so fashionable these days. We try to take advantage of local opportunities to gather components for our beer.

Hops have gotten so expensive lately. Instead of buying hops, we went outside our building and cut down kudzu next to the railroad tracks. It provides plenty of bittering and loads of fiber even though you don’t generally look to hops to provide fiber. Plus, you can detect that unmistakable tang from the smokestack of the locomotives that pass by.

...like this...

Barley has also gotten really high from competition for acreage by corn grown for ethanol. While we support alternative energy, why should we buy barley when a perfectly adequate substitute is available nearby? We chainsawed up some old railroad ties left next to the tracks and saved the sawdust. It makes a great wort, especially for dark beers.

All our railroad ties are fresh off the tracks, and freshly ground or chainsawed.

...sift to taste.

For yeast we have found Hambeerger Helper does the trick.

Water we get from roof runoff. (see diagram)

The first production step is to malt the barley. Malting is a roasting process that halts the germination of the barley, making fermentable sugars available. Next we mash in the malt to leach out fermentable sugars. The juice collected is called wort.

Then we boil the wort along with the hops for about an hour to isomerize the sugars and accumulate the bittering flavors from the hops. (photo soon.)

After the wort cools, we pipe it into the fermenter and add yeast. The yeast converts the fermentable sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide which escapes into the atmosphere for global warming. (photo soon.)

Once the fermentation has completed in about five days, we filter the beer through panty hose and pipe it into tanks in the cool cellar. From there the beer is drawn directly from the taps through refrigerated lines into clean glasses for our customers to savor.(photo soon)

Cheers!

Custom Cabinetmakers specializing in high quality public and commercial woodwork in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.