Since opening the doors in April of last year, Lithermans Limited has seen its fair share of milestones.
They have graduated from only being able to serve flights – small tasters of their beers – to offering up full pints of their tasty creations. They now serve food and recently expanded their tap room.
And just last week, Lithermans brewed a double batch for the first time, using their brand new seven barrel fermenter.
The fermenter is the first piece of new equipment added to what will eventually become a much larger brewing operation thanks to the above mentioned expansion. Since opening their doors, it’s been a constant battle to keep up with the demand.
“Places are going through more and more every week,” co-owner and head brewer Steve Bradbury said. “But it’s a good problem to have.”
With a new brewing system set to take shape early in 2018 (stay tuned), one that already allowed them to increase their brewing production from 93 gallons to up to 217 in one day, will go a long way to having, well, more good beer available.
On the inaugural double batch day, Bradbury and his brewing assistant, Sharon “Dropkick” Curley were making a massive amount of Misguided Angel, a New England-style IPA that is just flying off the shelves (and out of the tap) at a brisk rate.
While it eventually became one big batch in the new fermenter, Bradbury and Curley still had to make two separate batches because the brewing system is still the same size.
There’s a science to each recipe and it’s all contained in a top secret binder that even we didn’t get to look at. It contains the more than 80 recipes that Lithermans has brewed in less than two years – although quite a few have been small, five to 10 gallon test batches.
But Misguided is a staple and one that customers can’t get enough of. That’s why they’ve been brewing it twice a week for some time.
For Lithermans, it all starts with 70 gallons of hot water and a calculated amount of grains and malts in the mash tun. Another 70 gallons of hot water is added and the grains are steeped for an hour to create those fermentable sugars necessary for making beer.
An hour boil will turn that 140 gallons into about 100 to 110 gallons of wort. And with Misguided Angel, there are a lot of hops added in the last 10 minutes – to give it that great IPA flavor.
At this point though, it contains no alcohol. The wort is sent through a chiller, minus the hop particles, to the fermenter where it drops from the 212 degrees required for boiling to 65 degrees for storing. It will spend two weeks interacting with yeast to turn those sugars into the beer we know and love.
It’s into the bright tank after that for 48 hours where it is forced carbonation and eventually put into kegs.
It’s an exact science and one that needs to be replicated each brew.
“There’s a challenge to making the same beer consistently every time,” Bradbury said.
During the fermenting process, the beer is tasted and tested with the refractometer, which measures the sugar content.
Lithermans only fills sixtels for distribution, which are those small tube kegs, while they also dabble in cans and bottles – depending on how much beer they have left over after filling all the orders for restaurants, bars and what is needed for the tap room.
What makes brewing beer so interesting is that no two recipes are the same. There’s always a variation depending on the style and ingredients.
“They all have their own uniqueness to them,” Bradbury said.
But what some of you may not know is that the biggest part of making beer isn’t the actual brewing process, it’s the cleaning.
The sanitizer is always free flowing at breweries because making sure no unwanted bacteria gets into you beer is imperative. They sanitize before, during and after brewing.
“Eighty percent of what we do is cleaning and 20 percent is making wort – because the yeast makes the beer,” Bradbury said.
In all, it takes about eight hours from prep to clean up for a single batch – assuming nothing major pops up, which it always seems to.
“You need to be a problem solver, fix things on the fly,” Bradbury said. “And everything is time sensitive.”
Lithermans had been brewing two or three times a week, but with the expanded capacity that might bump up to as many as four times a week.
“We want to have variety in our tasting room,” Bradbury said.
Concord Craft
The plan was to watch both local beer makers create what would eventually become a brew we’d like to drink.
Unfortunately a few things got delayed so we missed out on seeing Concord Craft’s head brewer Doug Bogle in action. But we still got the lowdown from owner Dennis Molnar.
Concord Craft brews on average twice a week and just added three more fermenters to allow the production of more beer on its 15 barrel system. There’s a mixture of big batches featuring their top selling beers like the Kapitol Kolsch and The Gov’nah, a double IPA, that get distributed around the area, and smaller test batches that are strictly served in the tasting room. Although there have been many small batches that have turned into bigger parts of the rotation – because people really like them.
Concord Craft mills all of its own grain and uses steam jacketed equipment to monitor temperatures during the mashing and boiling process.
“Steam is the best thing to use at this size equipment,” Molnar said.
The brewery just passed one year since its first brew and have made 32 different beers since then.
The fun is tweaking the recipes and trying new things.
“We tend to play around the most in the IPA area,” Molnar said.
And that’s what we like to call music to our ears.
