I have this friend who opened a nanobrewery. He’s producing a decent amount of beer (however, quality-wise, it’s not the greatest) (at all) but I am a bit eh about his process - he takes a 2BBL batch and after mashing, splits it into four 20-gal kettles and boils each one separately. Afterwards they get chilled and combined in the fermenter. This seems wrong, but I don’t know why. Is there any technical reason why it’s a bad idea?
I don’t know that there is anything technically wrong with doing it that way. I suppose, depending how the wort is run off, you could have 4 boils with 4 different gravities, which would make hop utilization somewhat unpredictable. The biggest downside is that he’s doing 4 times the work and 4 times the cleaning. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy a single, adequately sized BK, than buy 4?
Not in Europe :-/
But yes, you’re right. I think he just doesn’t have the cash right now is all.
Seems awkward and brewing and blending in this manner is not very precise and probably not consistent either.
Is each boil exactly the same? From a technical aspect he’s introducing 4 variables- I can’t see his brew being consistent from batch to batch.
He should be able to get a little more consistency from boiling in 4 kettles providing that he is paying sufficient attention to each one, the four kettles are the same and have the same heaters, and the worts have the same initial gravity. Otherwise he is working in uncharted/unpredictable territory.
If there’s one word I’d use to describe his beers, it’s “unreproducible”
It can be unreproducible and still be wonderful, but it sounds like his are neither. Complicating the process definitely doesn’t help with reproducibility.
There’s not technically any problem with it, but I think it’s a bad idea because of how much it complicates things. Better to split it into the fermenters I think, than to have multiple boil kettles.