#1 Ingredient in Beer

If you follow Piney River Brewing Company on Facebook, you may have had part in the PRBC quiz fun we had, asking our Facebook fans what the #1 ingredient is in beer.  Some of our fans figured it out, some didn’t.  Either way, the #1 ingredient in beer is alive and well in the BARn tonight.

Brian and I spent the weekend hooking up pex lines to the water hook up in the BARn.

Here's where the water line came into the barn, and we hooked into it with the pex line.

A joint and shut off where the cold water runs along the wall to the far end of the brewery and across the ceiling to the hot water tank.

Cold water going in to the mechanical room to the hot water heater and hot water lines coming out.

Line where hot water will be accessed on the wet side of the brewery.

While we enjoyed the new album from The Decemberists, Andy did the honors and tapped the new water lines.

We think we may have a future brewer in the making here.  And now we’ve got grain, malt, yeast, hops and water.  The next thing to come must be beer!

Ta da!

We finished the interior portion of the wall on the wet side of the brewery tonight.

The cleaning of the brewery has begun.  And that’s a good thing because this is sitting inside the brewery, too.

Malt, grain, dextrose and other very important items for brewing beer.  Yes, we will begin actually brewing some beer soon.  There’s still lots of work to be done on the BARn, but we’ll have beer in there too…which is why we began this whole endeavor….

Progress as promised

Saturday proved to be a typically non-typical Ozark Saturday in January weather-wise.  We worked up a sweat cleaning up the piles of boards on the West end of the BARn.  There are no photos documenting the day’s work, but again, I will say that the hardest days of brewing will never be as laborious as the work we did on Saturday.

Brian picked through 8, 10, 12 foot old oak boards that once covered the outside of the barn.  He pulled nails, and then we moved the good old boards into the BARn, to dry out upstairs where they will be re-used.  I picked up hundreds of small pieces of scrap board and many large pieces filling the back of our Ranger time and time again.  I burned some boards and put others in piles for future bonfires.  Andy entertained a woolly worm, or maybe vice versa, and even picked up a couple of wheelbarrow loads of small board pieces.  Muscles were quivering by the day’s end.

We have been plugging away on interior walls, and we are just about to the point where we can thoroughly clean the wet side of the brewery and begin to set up our equipment as well as planning for future equipment.  So here’s where we are…door/wall into the wet side of the brewery.

Interior and exterior of mechanical room wall on the wet side of the brewery.

After dinner and before putting Andy to bed tonight…we covered the wall between the mechanical room and the wet side!

And, yes, in case you were wondering, that is the official brewery bicycle.  I think the head brewer rides it.

Walls

I’ve never built a wall before.  After this weekend, I can say that I’ve definitely been involved in building two, and I’ve got two more in my very near future.  Brian and my dad built the walls for the “farm room”, so he’s experienced.

Our goal has been to get the wet side of the brewery closed off from the remaining construction.   Last week we finished covering the existing walls with tin.  We also started framing up the new walls, placing them in between the 65 year old rough cut posts–the same rough cut posts that had a manger attached to them with several feet of composted manure and piles of old farm junk in it.  Was it really just a little over five months ago that we began this project in 100+ degree heat?

It’s about 30 degrees or less outside right now, but the heat in the barn is cranking.

We’ve got tunes.

And walls.

Those big, clear holes you see in the walls hold large sheets of clear acrylic that will allow visitors to see into the brewery.  Brian and I hadn’t worked with acrylic sheets before, and they were heavy and rather static-y, but the “look” is really cool.  It’s also provides an “open” feel to the first floor of the BARn since it’s divided into various rooms.

The first "window" into the the brewery.

We were planning to put tin on the interior walls, and I had the idea of running the tin all the way down to the concrete floor on these walls.  The concrete below the walls is really old concrete that made the mangers, and Brian was looking for a way to cover them to prevent water from going in any small holes or cracks in the old concrete.  We used the same J-trim with the tin on the interior walls.

Here's the backside of the walls after the tin was applied. We'll cover this later.

Here are the two walls, complete on the wet side of the brewery.

There are just two walls left to go.  One wall will have a door to the wet side of the brewery.  The other wall will be for the mechanical room.

Speaking of the mechanical room, here’s a little bit of brewery trivia for you.  What is the #1 ingredient in beer?

Stumped?

Answer:  Water

And in our case, delicious Ozark, limestone filtered water.

We picked up an 80 gallon hot water heater this weekend, and it’s ready to be hooked up in the mechanical room.

A new PRBC Blog category will start up later in the week…stay tuned.