Stagger’s brew day

By Sam Highley, Editor

The first big event of the year for the Canberra Brewers kicked off on Saturday 12 February with a brew day at the house of former Club-President Craig Webber (Stagger). As previously mentioned by Dan the event was designed to be both social and educational, providing an opportunity to meet members outside of the normal monthly club meeting, and also get a chance to see the same beer being brewed on two different systems.

The plan was to brew two separate batches of a Stone & Wood Pacific Ale style beer using both Stagger's seriously sweet PID-controlled Heat Exchanged Recirculating Mash System (HERMS), and also his old (but very successful) gravity-fed system now used by neighbour Matt.

HERM's brewing system complete with mash tun, HLT and boiler.

Matt performs the mash-in on the gravity system

The day kicked off around 10am with Stagger mashing in on the HERM's unit, followed shortly thereafter with a mash-in on the gravity system. While we waited for the mash to do it's thing, Stagger generously ran us all through a guided tasting of a few of his beers, which included a Kolsch, Irish Red, Classic American Pilsner and an American IPA. All were delicious, even if the CAP was a little on the corny side. With everybody well lubricated, education sessions on water treatment, filtering beer from keg to keg and force carbonating followed.

Filtering demonstration, with Ben and Dicko looking on

Vienna lager, before and after filtering (well, after and before, technically)

Ramming CO₂ into beer, otherwise known as 'force carbonating'

Stagger said help yourself to beer, right?

With both beers finished mashing and boiling away in their respective boilers, a huge array of meat, meat and yet more meat was consumed for lunch, complemented by a keg of Rumpole pale ale generously provided by club sponsor Wig & Pen. Also consumed was some genuine Pacific Ale provided by another great club sponsor, Plonk, to acquaint people with the style being brewed. A gathering of Canberra Brewers members is not complete without some sort of swag being given away, so, true to form, a raffle was held. Prizes were donated by club-sponsor Mashematics and a few lucky people walked away with more than they arrived with.

First runnings from the mash-tun into the boiler on the gravity system
 

Checking on progress on the gravity brew


The anatomy of a HERMS setup

By this stage we'd reached mid-afternoon, and both beers had been chilled and transferred to kegs, pitched with US-05 yeast, and left to ferment away until the March club meeting when both will be offered up for blind tasting, to decide once and for all which system creates the better beer: HERMS or gravity? My prediction: a dead-heat.