Knockin’ out a beer at Neal’s

I took Neal up on an opportunity to help with a brew day at his place down in Springville. Like I said, I always manage to learn a lot when I brew with Neal – hints, tips, history, science – all sorts of good stuff.

Here’s a collection of images from the brew day with some captions to help:

We got there around 10am – Neal was rocking out on his tractor cleaning up the trails behind his house – he’s got some acreage down there!

He has a handful of barn cats that he cares for – they always come hang out to see what’s happening.

How’s the hopyard looking:

All trimmed up and ready to start training! looking good Neal!

Now lets get down to business – Brewing his ‘Newcastle’ clone recipe, very exciting.  10 gallon batch! Thats a lot of grain!

Neal’s mill setup is no joke:

Ginding is something I’m good at!

Look at that grind!

Inside with his amazing fireplace:

Look at that cat!  Tony!

Everything is all set up and ready to go:

Sparging:

pretty dope flywheel style sparging device that he built:

Always fun to see what else he has in the works:

yes, that one carboy says ‘2013 Cider’ –  that’s been going for 4 years! pretty amazing that he has the patience to wait that long.  What about the name on this one:

Converted keg makes great boil kettle!

Sampled a bunch of different beers:

Check out this bottle opener – let’s you open a beer without jacking up the cap, so you can cram the cap back on or save it!

and there were more cats – kittens actually!

Adding hops!

So, Neal gets infections in his beer, but what’s interesting is that he has a naturally occurring bacteria that some breweries love to create the funky flavors, he hates that flavor, and uses aquarium pumps with 1 micron filters hooked up to keep positive air pressure flowing out of his carboys after he cleans and sanitizes – pretty awesome idea!

those hoses are going to the two carboys that he has on standby. He also uses the same apparatus to aerate his wort !

Almost done!

Time to chill – check out Neal’s home made counterflow wort chiller!

pretty effective – he can dial it in so that the temp going into the carboy is the perfect pitching temp.

Yeast was pitched – and the carboys went into his fermentation chamber –

Then it was time for dinner!

You might recognize these pepper bark ribs:  

They were yummy!

Can’t wait to try the brown ale – pre ferment it was damn tasty!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *