Make Beer at The Beer Factory
Ever wanted to make beer? If you’re in Sydney, you can. And you’ll have access to all the recipes, materials and equipment you need at a fraction of the price of setting it up yourself. Let me tell you about my experience!
In Seven Hills in Sydney there is a Beer Factory where you can make almost 1000 different types of beer, including, of course the wine of beer, craft beer.
My group headed there on Wednesday to make beer. To create a Russian Imperial Stout.
This was an awesome experience!
We were given a section of a preparation table, and were loaned an ingredients list and a recipe with detailed instructions on how to make the beer, and then were given guidance on where to gather the ingredients from in the factory, as well as help in how to put it all together.
Generally, (as we wouldn’t want to give away The Beer Factories secrets), here are the steps we followed.
They had barrels already prepared for the different types of malts available so we collected some stout to get started and put that in a kettle for brewing.
Then we weighed and added some fermentables – Dextrose
Weighed and ground some roasted barley, then added that.
Added some different types of hops and other ingredients, then let it simmer in the kettle. After that we created a jug with yeast and warm water and left that to breed and multiply.
Of course, while we were waiting for the different heating times to be over, we got through a couple of beers each. Their Breakaway Oatmeal Stout was creamy with a stronger bitter finish and their Munich Dunkel was a bit like Toohey’s Old. The Cream Ale had a nice honey taste but was more sweet than bitter. The Nippon tasted a bit like Asahi.
When the kettle was finished, our trainer released the filtered liquid and sprayed that into our plastic barrel. We then added the yeast to the barrel.
It was then sealed and packed away and it’ll be ready to be bottled in about 4 weeks. (Different waiting times for different beers.)
Total time spent at The Beer Factory to do the first step in creating 50 litres of beer – 90 minutes!
The cost of the ingredients, bottles, boxes and training came to $315. We won’t know how many bottles we’ll make from it but the rough estimate is that it should make about 50 litres, approximately 151 x 330ml bottles.
So about $2.10 a bottle!
Fun day! Looking forward to bottling in 4 weeks’ time!
[I couldn’t make the bottling but my friends did and they said it was even more fun. Washing put bottles, filling them from the tap, stamping the lids on them, and drinking some in between.]
