So I recently visited brewery with 100yo technology and what struck me most was how little has changed.
Now you basically have only differences in driving the brewery - electromotors instead of steam engines and transmissions.
Basic technology like 2 tanks - one for boiling and mashing, other for sparge and leaving decoction parts (with perforated bottom) - is same to this day.
Other thing that’s different is cooling, you now have coolers for quickly cooling wort and cooled tanks. Instead of shallow baths where the wort is pooled to cool and putting ice to cellars.
So did you checked some historical brewerys with copper tanks and stuff like this? Did it make you change or adjust your brewing setup? Did you learn anything?
Never changed anything. Visited castles in UK. Saw how they did it, and yeah, you get it 95% right very quickly, and there isn’t much left to improve upon.
It is wicked cool to see that yeah if I’m ever trapped in the past, at least I’ll be okay brewing
Check out ingredients too. Like kveik yeast that ferments at 90-100 F, allowing people to brew without electrical chillers. Still to be found for use today, NB calls their strain “Lutra”.
Or alternates to hops and how they tied to the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation.
It was built 100 yers after lager brewing proces and ~500 years after hops usage. 200 years ago or so the brewing process became more industrialized, this brewery was modernized multiple times and was in use until 1977.
In about 200 years it basically didn’t changed. But these really old technologies and history is interesting too, you just refer to something at least 100 years off of what I refer to in my post.
I hope that I will visit National museum of brewing technology this fall, they have loads of instruments, machinery and stuff from 19th and early 20th century when they really experimented with the process. In my opinion it is most interesting part of industrial brewing history.
