I toured Anchor Brewing Company today with the Bay Area Brew Crew. The free tour is entertaining and informative and well worth the price of admission. It's a fairly standard tour with time spent talking about the history of the brewery and the brewing process and then a walk through the brewery viewing their brewing room, open fermentation chambers, yeast lab, cold conditioning room, bottling and kegging lines, and ending up back at the tap room for a tasting. They had Anchor Summer Beer, Anchor Steam, Liberty Ale, Anchor Porter, and Old Foghorn on tap today.
Some interesting things I learned on the tour:
- Anchor brews five 110-barrel batches a day with only one mash tun, one lauter tun, and one brew kettle.
- Primary fermentation lasts only three days.
- All of the Anchor beers are cold-conditioned for three weeks at 34°F and Old Foghorn is cold conditioned at 34°F for six months.
- Anchor beer is krausened and naturally carbonated in the cold-conditioning tanks using standard ale yeast (lager yeast for Anchor Steam).
- All Anchor beer is filtered and flash-pasteurized.
- Anchor dries their yeast for storage between uses.
- Professional brewers still have boilovers.
- When the Anchor brewers run the bar in the taproom, the tasting samples flow freely.
This is an excellent tour and is highly recommended. Advance reservations are required and can be made by calling the brewery at 415-863-8350.
I took my first pass at making a Westvleteren Abt 12° clone today. If you're going to try to clone a beer, why not go for the best, right? If nothing else, it's a challenge. I started out looking at the recipe printed in Beer Captured but decided not to go that route based on what Michael Jackson writes about Westy in Great Beers of Belgium:
"Only pale malt is used, with white and dark sugar. The first runnings from the mash tun go to one kettle, to make a strong beer, the second runnings to the other for a lower-gravity brew. It is a very traditional method. Northern Brewer hops are used, and Westmalle yeast."
"At no stage is the beer centrifuged or filtered. Protein and yeast are left to precipitate during maturation, the duration of which matches in weeks the Belgian degrees of density. The 6° gets six weeks, and so forth. This makes for firm, long, big, fresh flavours."
Here's the recipe I came up with and brewed:
Westvleteren Abt 12° clone (batch #1) (for 3.5 gallons)
18.5 lbs Belgian Pale Malt
1 lb Clear Candi Sugar (1°L)
1 lb Amber Candi Sugar (75°L)
0.5 lb Dark Candi Sugar (275°L)
0.7 oz Northern Brewer Hop Pellets (7.8% AA) (60 min)
0.3 oz Northern Brewer Hop Pellets (15 min)
0.3 oz Northern Brewer Hop Pellets (5 min)
Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity Yeast (1/2 gallon starter)
Single infusion mash at 152°F.
OG: 1.104 (at 40% no sparge efficiency)
IBU: ~30
SRM: ~30
This was the first no sparge batch I had calculated using just the first runnings and I overshot my gravity fairly significantly. I ended up with 3.5 gallons of great-tasting 1.114 wort! As per Michael Jackson's writing, I just dumped the entire contents of the kettle into the fermenter after cooling with no whirlpool and no hop straining. It's currently busy fermenting away with a massive head of krausen.