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

--Jeffrey

Recently Michael has been working on getting power installed at the brewery site. He built the main external fuse box himself out of component parts. It’s the product of spending hours at the Austin Public Library studying electrical wiring this past fall and winter while I was likely watching football. He’s truly our Little Lebowski Urban Achiever…and proud we are of him. If anyone has any specific questions on the brewery electrical wiring, just shoot us an e-mail (jstuffings@jesterkingbrewery.com).


Our chiller recently arrived, which will keep our fermentations temperature controlled and chill the water in our cold liquor tank. Our task is to install the copper piping connecting the chiller to the tanks using a crimping device called the Propress.


Propress

--Jeffrey

At the Great Austin Beer Festival last week, we unveiled Jester King’s new logo/artwork. We’ve evolved a lot since December 2007 when we first started working toward one day opening Jester King. Through various sources of inspiration such as traveling to the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago, reading the exploits of The Mad Fermentationist and the writings of Jeff Sparrow, tasting several of the wondrous beers imported by the Shelton Brothers, concocting various homebrew experiments and just having our eyes opened to the world beyond cultured brewers yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae), we’ve decided to pursue beers that age and mature for several weeks or months in oak barrels under the mischievous influence of wild yeast. Beers of this nature have become our greatest passion and hold a special place in our hearts and palates.

We’ve also taken stock of our location in the Texas Hill Country with its own unique flora and fauna influenced by the surrounding wineries, orchards and olive groves. We’re aiming to use the wild yeast from the Hill Country to impart unique and complex flavors in Jester King beer.

With that said, we decided to adopt new artwork to better capture our vision, passion, inspiration.

Created by Josh Cockrell of The Design Shaman

--Jeffrey

We spent Thursday using a pipe threader to cut and thread the pipe for our steam boiler. It’s kind of a scary machine with lots of blades, teeth and loud noise, but it’s actually pretty fun to use (I say that now with all ten fingers intact).

Pipe threader’s teeth

Pressure reducing valve to drop the steam pressure down to 15 psig for the kettle

--Jeffrey

This picture is of the bottom of our mash/lauter tun. The motor in the middle powers the mash rakes that churn the grist during the mash and prevent the grain from clumping together during the mash. Grain that clumps together will not become solubilized and will not be accessable to the enzymes that convert starch to sugar. The mash rakes allow for better efficiency by breaking up the clumps or “dough balls”. We opted for the bottom mounted motor to avoid any residue from the motor dripping into the mash. The blue handle on the left is for the grain out port on the bottom of the mash tun. We’ll open the port and shift the angle of the mash rakes so they force the spent grain out through the bottom of the mash tun as they rotate.

30 horse power boiler that provides 150 psig of steam to power the brew kettle.

Main office with event pavilion in background

Main hallway of brewery

We had Pedernales Electric out to boost the power available to the brewery to 480 volts

--Jeffrey