 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground, I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this episode, join us as we tour Bemidji Brewing and Jack Pine Brewery and Brainerd Baxter as they share their unique recipes for fermentation. My name is Tom Hill, I'm head brewer and co-founder of Bemidji Brewing Company and we're sitting in our new taproom space and behind me is the new production space. I got into brewing kind of the way a lot of craft brewers of this era did and that's through home brewing. I started home brewing at BSU, my alma mater and started home brewing in sophomore year of college and just fell in love with it. So I went to school for design technology with emphasis in model making and it was something I was really interested in but I also had this side path of home brewing that I just love, production of beer, history of it. I just dug into as much as I could and it was during my time at school that I met Justin Keaney who was also in the same program and we had chatted briefly about starting a brewery and we both kind of went our separate ways for career paths and then in 2010 we found ourselves working in the prototype industry which is what I went to school for but we both kind of wanted to change and at that time our girlfriends and our wives were involved as well and we said well let's give this a go and we returned to the idea of starting a brewery and by then I had really dug into home brewing and I just attended the Siebel Institute in Chicago it's the nation's oldest brewing school and really just do as much research and development as I could prior to starting Bomingie Brewing Company. So this is our malt room and this is really where the process starts. Yesterday before the brew day we had a pal of the grain in here that had the whole recipe built on it. We measured out any small amounts that we need in the buckets and then we mill it into our malt mill. You can see there's two steel rollers that are ribbed and those roll against each other and it crushes the malt. If you look at the kernels of malt you can see that nature's wrapped that up in such a good little package that it's really difficult for water to get in there and pests to get in there. For us though we're interested in what's inside the malt we're interested in the endosperm and that's what's gonna convert to sugar in the mash. And then in the white PVC tube is a flex auger so just like a silo system and then it'll get augered up to the hopper above our mash ton. And then we'll do that the day before that way in the morning we show up everything's prepped, ready to roll for mashing in. Chris is measuring out some phosphoric acid right now which we'll use to acidify our mash. So one important thing for our mash is we definitely want it to be in the right pH range and this will assist us with our current water profile in the midgy to hit the numbers that we're looking for. We preheat our mash ton with hot water at the beginning of the brew day just to kind of get everything up to temperature. That way when we bring in the room temperature malt and the hot water we don't lose any more heat than we need to just to the metal itself and the container itself. So just have some hot water kind of coming out of here right now. This is our two vessel 15 barrel brew house and we'll start the day in our mash ton which is a mixing vessel for our Crush Barley which is held up in this hopper right here above it. And it's got a stirring rake. We'll mix in water at a specific temperature and we'll conduct a mash in here and later on we'll be moving it over to our boil kettle literally just a large steam heated kettle. This will be adding hops and doing a 90 minute boil and from there we'll move on to fermentation. Today we're brewing our autumn IPA which is the first time I ever brewed this beer. It's Chris's recipe he devised kind of a big red IPA for the fall and they include some flaked wheat. We send this into the mash ton just through the man way. Our mill doesn't like sending flaked product through it so it's easier just to dump it in ourselves. I believe there is what 1122 pounds of malt in this batch. So we haven't pushed the mash ton quite that far yet so we will see what happens. So the first thing Chris is going to do is add a foundation water to the kettle, a layer of foundation water and that's gonna just bring that water up above the mash screen on the bottom. And from there we'll begin to add the malt in from the hopper. And throughout the water addition as it's flowing in the mash ton we also add the phosphoric acid and water mixture. Again just so it's thoroughly incorporated into the mash and helps us get our pH right where we want it. So once we get mashed in we'll recirculate upon itself for a bit and pull a sample. You see the rakes have been turned on now ready to begin stirring the malt as Chris adds it in through a slide gate underneath the hopper. So the goal of us mashing in right now is to incorporate the malted barley, any wheat products or adjuncts that we have with hot water. And that hot water activates enzymes in the malt that begin to break down the starches in the grains into sugars. And it's these sugars that will be fermented then by the yeast. Right now the mash looks very starchy, very milky and throughout the process it'll get clearer and more sugary. And you'll be able to visually see that happen as well as taste it. So Chris is keeping an eye on this flow totalizer that is letting him know just the amount of water that's come through the blending station. So right now we just finished up adding all the grain and we're shooting for 365 gallons of water total. So we've got about 20 gallons left to go here and it looks like we fit it all in there. So we'll slow the rakes down a bit and let the mash settle a little bit and then we'll recirculate upon itself to pull a sample for pH. So this is a grant and what it is it's an intermediary vessel between all the other vessels and it's got two radio frequency sensors on the back here that detect the liquid level. And as it comes above the bottom sensor it'll kick on our first pump and draw that liquid wherever it's going. In this case it's gonna go back upon the mash just onto the top so we just recirculate upon itself. And if it flows out too quick and fills up the grant top sensor kicks on and it'll stop the flow, allow it to draw down and it'll modulate it right in between those two sensors. We're just gonna do a quick recirculation here so we just kinda control it by hand just to get the quick sample we need. So right now you can see it's really chunky, it's full of some husk material, it's also very milky looking. Later on once the mash is complete and all the starch has been converted to sugar and we're sending it over to the boil kettle you'll see it'll be a nice clear red and be basically sugar water at that point. And then now if you look up in the top of the mash ton you can see it's coming through this sight glass here so it's going through our pump system through pneumatic valve up this tube and then right back in. So if you look up in there there's a spreader in there it just makes a nice gentle cone so that way we're not just digging a hole in the mash bed when we recirculate upon itself. We do this at this point to make sure that all the acid that we added, the salts, all that mixing just helps homogenize the whole mash. So when we take our pH sample we've got a consistent medium to take it from. Once we have our sample and everything's been mixed up and we've made any adjustments we need to make now the mash will rest for 40 minutes. And again that's when the starch and sugars are converting and after that we'll start the process called warlock. So Chris is taking the pH of our mash sample right now and we're shooting for Shooting for 5.3 pretty much. 5.3, 5.3.5 It looks like we hit 5.30 on the pH meter. That's all gonna relate to the enzymes that are active in the mash and how efficient they are in converting starches to sugar. The mouth feel the beer and the hop character of the beer and how crisp or round the beer is in the finished product. So to start the beer off at the right pH range is crucial it just kinda carries itself after that. So other than the acid that we added to the mash Chris right now is mixing up a variation of salts. So in this one we've got some gypsum or calcium sulfate, some canyon salt which is just sodium chloride and then some calcium chloride as well. And again we're fortunate to have really great water to brew with in Bemidji. It's a little high in carbonate. That's why we add the phosphoric acid to knock that down but with the salts we're really looking for a water profile something that's going to accentuate the hops, accentuate the malts that we're using. So the salts that are being added now are really for aesthetic purposes rather than functionality. So once we're transferring the wort over to the boil kettle and the liquid portion of the mash is moving out of there we want to start sparging and sparging literally means rinsing of the grain. So Chris is drawing in some water from our hot liquor tank right now and that'll just be slowly sprinkled over the grain bed and trying to keep the liquid level the same throughout the entire transfer. And what this is doing is helping rinse out all those sugars that are trapped within the grain husks and throughout the mash. At this point the entire mash bed is acting as a filter. So we have the screen that's on the bottom of the mash bed that's really just keeping out the chunks but then you've got all that husk material that forms a matrix within the mash bed and as the liquid flows through that it forms its own filter bed. And right now we're trying to be as gentle as we can with the beer. So we're sparging slow or rinsing real slow. We've got our pump turned way down and we're just slowly transferring over the boil kettle because we don't want to collapse that filter that we've created with the mash. So as the work flows out of the mash tun through multiple points on the bottom so it's drying nice and even it flows through a series of valves and up into the grants. And again this is just an intermediary vessel between the mash tun and the boil kettle and it prevents just gravity draining pulling down that mash bed. So it goes in here, it floats up and it's modulated with two RF frequency controllers that will keep it right in the middle of that sight glass. And this allows us to verify the clarity as well as more importantly control the runoff speed over to the boil kettle. There's a lot of proteins in here still. So once we boil those will coagulate and drop out and we'll really start to see a clear beer but you can start to visually see just the deep red color that we're shooting for with this one. Chris has just placed a sample into our refractometer and what this does is it measures light as it's refracted through the sample and the more sugar you have in there the more it's refracted. So we're able to look through this device and be able to see the percent sugar. For us that allows us to know kind of if we're on track for the recipe and just where the starting point is for the mash. So I've assembled basically the kit of everything I need to assemble this 15 barrel fermenter sanitizing as I go. And then we will be able to fill a portion of the cone with percetic acid sanitizer and recirculated amongst itself to get the whole vessel sanitized and just ready to roll for the end of the brew day. So then everything in the beer touches will have had this sanitizer ran through it and they'll be ready to receive the finished beer. So right now we're transferring the finished wort out of the boil kettle through our heat exchanger through the brewer's tube over to our 15 barrel fermenter. We've got cold water running in one direction of the heat exchanger and then we've got hot wort coming in the other direction. And then we're watching a thermometer here that's telling us what temperature is coming out of there at. So we're shooting for 66 today. Once it comes out of the heat exchanger we're also injecting oxygen into it and that's for yeast health. So that's gonna help the yeast grow and perform the way that we want it to. So you can see this whole mass of bubbles in there that we're injecting it in line through a venturi mechanism. And then we're going to inject the yeast pitch into the beer in line. So after counting our yeast we determined that 31 kilograms is exactly where it need to be for this beer so we're going to work to get that set in line here. We're all set with our yeast. So from here on out it's just a matter of continuing to chill the beer on its way to the fermenter until the kettle's empty. And then we'll put the blow off hose into a bucket of sanitizer and we'll be wrapped up with the brew day and it's just a matter of cleaning it up. I'm Patrick Sundberg, owner, founder and brewer here at Jack Pine Brewery and we are brewing beer, we're bottling beer and cleaning kegs all today here at the brewery. Well I started as a home brewer. Basically a home brewer in my garage got into the hobby more and more and really got interested in it. I started entering home brew competitions and doing pretty well in them. I became a certified beer judge and got more and more into it as a hobby level. And it kind of got to a point where I wanted to work at a brewery but there were no breweries in this area so I felt that it was time to start something up here. So I spent about four years putting together a business plan, doing research on what had worked for breweries and what hadn't worked and everything kind of fit together and we opened the doors to the tap room January of 2013. The crushed malted barley and the other grains are being stirred in with hot water. The temperature in here is gonna hit at about 154 degrees when it's all said and done. That will sit for one hour while the enzymes in the malted barley are converting the complex sugars into simple sugars that the yeast can use later on. Once the mash is done we'll run off the liquid portion into the boil kettle over here and we've got the first batch of the day is actually coming to an end here and we're just getting going on the second batch now. Once the liquid portions pulled over into the boil kettle it'll boil for an hour and a half and we add hops at different times throughout the process depending on the style and the type of beer that we're brewing. Once the batch is done we'll run it through a whirlpool which is what we're at right now with the second batch. Basically just a recirculation. What that does is it'll pull a lot of the hop particles together and any sort of proteins that are left over in the boil pull it to the middle so they don't end up into the fermenter. So we're just finishing up the first batch of the day and kind of about mid process on the second batch. We're doing the recirculation or the vorloff it's the official term for it. Basically in the mash we're pulling a little bit of the wort the liquid portion off and pumping it up to the top just to kind of get it to clear up. The grain in the bottom actually sets up its own filter bed so it'll trap a lot of the proteins and any of the grain bits from getting into the boil. You want to keep as much grain out of the boil as you can because if you boil grain you'll get kind of a harsh astringency. So we'll run this for about 15 minutes while we're cleaning out the boil kettle and getting it ready for the next batch to go into it. Now we're sparging the grains. We're gradually introducing hot water on top of the grain and then pumping it off of the bottom of the mash tun into the boil kettle. Starting out it runs pretty sweet. A lot of the concentrated sugars from the mash will come through into the boil kettle and then it gradually starts to thin out as the water rinses the grain. The goal is basically to get as much of the sugars out of the grain as we can during this process. And this is where it starts to get nice and toasty in here. Once the fermenter's full and the whole batch is chilled down to 60 degrees we'll actually pitch a fresh slurry of yeast. This is what does all the work. This is what converts it from the sugars that we set up in the mash into alcohol and then the byproduct is carbon dioxide. We're actually on the third generation right now. We harvest from batch to batch. We'll go out about seven generations of reusing the yeast. I use primarily one strain of yeast for the brewery just for that fact so I can recycle the yeast and use it from batch to batch. It kind of maintains its health a little bit better. The first pitch of yeast is always a little bit sluggish but then once it kind of hits its stride and gets a feeling for both our fermentation temperature and the beers that we're brewing then it really takes off and it ferments it really well. So that's the stuff right there. Those guys are the hardest working critters in the brewery. So after the whirlpool is done we'll chill the beer down as quickly as possible. Run it through a heat exchanger here which takes it from near boiling down to 60 degrees. On the way to the fermenter here it runs into the bottom of one of these fermenters. Right now we've got eight fermenters going. So once the beer is in the fermenter and chilled down it's time to put the yeast in here and get them to work. Correct a little bit. Now this is a nice thick slurry of yeast on the bottom here. This is third generation. It's been pulled from a few other batches. Get as much as we can out of there. Now the real work starts. The yeast will eat the sugars and convert it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. And the yeast during fermentation also produces a lot of other compounds in there that would give the beer kind of its unique flavor. We've got eight fermenters up and running it right now. We can brew about four batches a week. This room is temperature controlled. I keep it at 62 degrees. Kind of keeps the fermentation under check. Fermentation actually produces heat. So the fermenters will heat up if left to their own devices. But since the room is set at 62 it kind of keeps the fermentation under control and keeps the yeast doing what we want it to do. So once the beer is done fermenting it will get pumped into these bright tanks. And this is where the beer clears out. We chill it down, clear it up and carbonates all in these guys. The beer will sit here for two to four days, something like that, depending on the brew schedule. These bright tanks will keg it off. We actually use one of these. There's a racking cane in here that pulls off the beer from a little bit above the bottom so we're not pulling any of the yeast that is yeast or proteins that have settled out. So we'll keg it off right off of here. And once it's in the keg it's ready to go. Ready to go to either our tap room or to our wholesale accounts around town. So we're bottling our 22 ounce bombers right now. We just launched bombers in the liquor stores over Memorial Day weekend. And so we kind of run through the process here. We bottle right from a keg. So this is a little sanitizer rig. We've got the sink full of sanitizing solution. Let me blast it through here. We've got ice packs in there to actually chill it down so it cools down the bottles. We'll get less foaming on the bottler if the bottles are chilled before we run them in through the bottler. We give them a quick rinse of sanitizer, let them drip dry and then run them through this counter pressure filler. So what this does is it'll flush any oxygen out of the bottle with a CO2 first and then it fills from the bottom under pressure. Similar process that larger breweries would use but a little bit more manual. You lose just a touch of carbonation between the filler and the capper but because we're not leaving the bottle sit out for an extended period of time. The goal is, is we try to cap on top of foam so it does push all of the oxygen out but there's such a small amount of oxygen in there. And another thing we have going for us is this beer isn't filtered, it's not pasteurized. So there's actually living yeast still in the bottle. So if there's a little bit of oxygen in there the yeast will kind of scavenge that up and take care of it. An hour for a half barrow keg. So we can do about seven cases an hour with two people is really nice. Aaron's been running it on his own for a little bit here but it does work pretty good with two people. And then all of the bottles get a date stamp too on the fill date. So we can keep track of rotation and make sure we've got fresh stock rolling around the liquor stores. That's usually not a problem because the beer we're on such a small scale the beer tends to move fairly fast. It took a little bit to dial the system in. We were getting a lot of foam initially and it was just, it was a little bit of a headache but we're about to the point where we need to be brewing a batch every single week now just to keep up with how fast it's moving. That's one of the advantages of being a smaller brewer. We're brewing four batches a week. So if we kind of anticipate a need going down in the future we can kind of scale up and be like, okay let's brew two batches of it this week just to kind of get ahead of it and catch up versus being a larger brewery in a smaller community. If we were only brewing every other week it'd be a little tough to try to plan the production out. We wouldn't be able to have as many beers as we have right now. I mean the tap room right now has about 11 beers on tap give or take depending on the week. We wouldn't be able to keep up with with that many different brands and beers on tap if we didn't have such a small system. There is absolutely a community about Minnesota breweries and especially with so many being added in the last few years. So we started planning there were just over 20 breweries in Minnesota and this last year we capped over 100. So within four years we really just skyrocket with the number of breweries available in Minnesota. While there are a lot of little breweries that are popping up all over the place we're all kind of in this together. We like to use the term cooperation. So even though a lot of craft brewers in Minnesota and other regional brewers that distribute within this area going for the same customers there's absolutely the competition side of it vying for tap handle space and shelf space in the bottle shops but there's also that community aspect that we are all small brewers and we're all operating right at the same guidelines. As competitive as the market is we're all still little guys trying to make it go at it and there's so many more aspects into getting a business up and running. And it's almost more of how do we navigate the larger brewers, the aniser bushes and the millers and the cores and the import brands and how do we make our footprint as stable as possible within Minnesota. You know the business side is actually a lot more difficult than the brewing side or it should be anyway. I think my favorite part of the brewery business from the brewer's perspective is just being able to share with somebody and with the public something that I've made and has been developed in my mind's eye in our brewer's mind's eye and being able to really have a goal for something, see it through and then see somebody enjoy it. Thank you so much for watching. Join us again next week on Common Ground. If you have an idea for a common ground piece that pertains to North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call us at 218-333-3014. To view any episode of Common Ground online visit us at lptv.org We order episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. If you enjoyed this episode of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground consider making a contribution at lptv.org.