We managed to get the grist case above the mash tun. Michael welded a pulley to the ceiling and we lifted the grist case with a winch. The grist case allows us to quickly mash in about 2,000 lbs. of milled grain.

--Jeffrey

Jeff on the brewery roof with Jester King’s “cool ship”

The title of this post is certainly tongue-in-cheek. Our “cool ship” at this point is just a small tub. But we’re very serious about using the naturally occurring wild yeast from the Texas Hill Country in our effort to craft unique beer that incorporates its natural, living environment. At the present time, we’ve created a mini-cool ship to take cooling wort (unfermented beer) and inoculate it with wild yeast from our natural surroundings in the vineyard, orchard and olive grove rich region of the Texas Hill Country. Vineyards in particular tend to be great sources of indigenous wild yeast.

With a cool ship, the cooling wort is placed in a shallow, open-air vessel where naturally occurring wild yeast in the atmosphere have access to it. In our case, once the wort was inoculated with wild yeast at the Jester King brewery, it was sent to the Brewing Science Institute in Colorado for isolation and culturing of the wild yeast strains. Once the wild yeast is cultured and grown up to pitchable quantities in the lab, we will add it to the oak barrels full of beer in our barrel cellar. Over time, the wild yeast will slowly ferment most of the remaining sugar in the beer creating complex and interesting flavors that are the natural product of our own unique geography.

We plan on culturing wild yeast at different times throughout the year as the flora and fauna changes with the seasons. Eventually, we plan on installing a full-size cool ship at Jester King like the one in the picture below. This will allow us to take several barrels of beer at once and spontaneously ferment it with naturally occurring wild yeast. Many centuries ago, all beer was fermented spontaneously prior to the discovery of brewers yeast or saccharomyces cerevisiae. Once the wort is inoculated with wild yeast as it cools in the cool ship, it is transferred to oak barrels for a long, slow fermentation process that can take up to three years. During the long fermentation, several types of wild yeast and bacteria play a role in creating a complex range of flavors.

Cool ship at Allagash in Maine

--Jeffrey

Here’s an update on a few random odds and ends as we get closer to firing up the brewing system for the first time…

This is our diatomaceous earth (DE) beer filter. It’s five square meters and should filter about 50 barrels of beer at a time. We’ll filter the beer to strip it of saccharomyces cerevisiae (cultured brewers yeast) after primary fermentation prior to the beer being transferred to oak barrels for secondary fermentation with wild yeast. The filter will also play a roll in the bottle conditioning of our beer. Jester King beer that’s bottled will go through a second fermentation in the bottle to create naturally occurring carbonation. We’ll use the filter to remove the weak, stressed out yeast from primary fermentation and add fresh yeast at bottling along with priming sugar to carbonate the beer.

We purchased the malted barley we’ll use for the first beers we’ll brew. The base malt for our beer will be Great Western Organic Two-Row. Our specialty malts tend to be largely English, Belgian and German such as Simpsons caramalt, Weyermann malted rye and Belgian caramunich. I’m personally a huge fan of the rich malt flavors from UK maltsters such as Simpsons and Crisp. These malts are more expensive than others, but are very worth it in terms of flavor.

We purchased a 1996 Roskamp SP650-6 grain mill with 6.5 inch diameter rollers. The grooves are in good shape and shouldn’t need re-corrugation for a few years. Roskamp mills are big and heavy with a good reputation for durability.

We got the rain water collection tanks we recently blogged about in place and upright along side of the brewery.

Michael welded this support structure for our grist case above the mash tun. The milled grain will be augered up to the grist case prior to mashing, which will allow us to “mash in” the milled grain fairly quickly.

Our first order of kegs arrived. They’re 50L stainless steel, sanke kegs purchased from Magic Hat Brewery in Vermont. We actually did a combined keg order with our friends at Circle Brewing Co. in Austin.

We’re slowly finishing construction of the building that houses the brewery. Our focus has been mostly on setting up the brewing equipment.

--Jeffrey

We are excited to announce that Jester King will begin harvesting rain water for use in its brewing process. We recently purchased 3,000 gallon rain water collection tanks from Tank Town in Dripping Springs, which is also home to Richard’s Rain Water. We will use the roof of both the brewery and 8,000 square foot beer hall next door to catch an estimated 10,000 barrels of rain water per year for use in brewing. Prior to use, the rain water will go through ultraviolet and reverse osmosis purification.

We see using rain water for brewing at Jester King as part of a larger movement amongst craft breweries to return to our nation’s pastime of local, sustainable beer and transition away from the aberrant era of centralized, mass-produced, industrial light lager.

--Jeffrey

The last few days we’ve been installing the brewhouse and glycol piping. Here are a few pictures:

--Jeffrey