The Brewery at Wigtoft

The brewery gets a work out with a double-batch of birthday bitter (a Maris Otter base, a little Caramalt and Munich, with a good dose of East Kent Golding hops and a sprinkling of Willamette).

The stainless kettle on the left is where the sweet malty wort is boiled with the hops. This wort (pronounced "wert") is obtained by mixing crushed grain and hot water (67c, in this case) in the chilly bin on the right (mash tun). It sits for an hour, converting starch to fermentable dextrins.

The chilly bin in the centre, aka the hot liquor tank, holds more hot water that is showered (sparged) through the hot grainy mixture to extract fermentable sugars. This process is slow, to enable maximum extraction of fermentable sugars, and takes around 90mins.

Here's the sparge in action (plenty more room for grain, if I was planning on brewing a barley wine!):

And here is the sweet unhopped golden wort, which is running out of the mash tun:

The wort usually runs straight into the kettle, which I then lift. But seeing that this is a double-batch, and that the kettle is a bit hard to lift when it's got over 25L in it, I run the last 15L or so into jugs before transferring into the kettle.

A picture of the finished beer, a hoppy 4.5% golden bitter currently fermenting at 18c in two sepearate fermenters (one of which will be dry hopped), will follow in three to four weeks.