University Daily Kansan / Tuesday, April 23, 1991
Features
5
Chuck Magerl, Free State Brewery proprietor, shovels used grain from the boiling kettle into a wheelbarrow. The grain will be sold to a local swine farmer
Bradt examines readings from a wet hydrometer used to measure the amount of suspended solids in the fermenting beer.
Steve Bradt, assistant brewer, washes away contaminants in the brewing room to avoid a change in the taste of the beer.
Kansas' own
brews
Brewery mixes tradition science to create its beer
Free State Brewing Company Inc. 636 Massachusetts St., represents both past and present.
Steve Bradt, assistant brewer for Free State, said that the brewing room was kept sparkling clean with washings of iodine and hot water.
Bradt said that scientific instruments such as refractometers, which measure refraction, and wet hydrometers, which measure mass, in the same process, but the process itself had not changed much through history.
The brewing process
Malt barley grain from Wisconsin is milled above the brewing room. The grain rushes into the large cylin-
gular hole where it is mixed with hot water.
The business at Free State is not one of amateur basement brewing but a mixture of modern science and professional brewing.
In the first two stages, bittering hops are added during the first half hour of boiling
The hot water removes simple sugars from the grain. The result of this process is sweet raw beer, or wort. After the vat is full, the hot water is recirculated through the grain for about 30 minutes.
The wort is then boiled in the kettle for about an hour and a half while hops are added in three different stages.
The wort is then transferred into the boiling kettle. During the transfer, the grain is rinsed with hot water and then boiled for 10 minutes and to rinse the sugar from the straps.
The bittering hops counteract the sweetness of the wort, help settle the boil and act as a natural preservative for the beer.
Just before the boil is complete, the finish, or aromatic hops, are added.
"The finish hops don't contribute a great deal of bitterness, but they do provide some of the aroma and more subtle flavor of the beer." Bradt said.
Story and Photos by Tim Miller
Page design by Keith Thorpe
The wort is then settled, and the sediments are removed. The sediments are particles of hops and wheat, which have been kept together during the boil. The wort is
Bradt said similar filters were also in swimming pools as well as by the wine industry and the aircraft industry, which uses them to filter jet fuel
ABOVE: The brewing room of Free State Brewery contains the brewing kettle, boiling kettle and fermentation tanks.
After the beer is filtered, it is piped into the 225-gallon storage tanks in the refrigerated room adjacent to the brewing room.
RIGHT: Bradt looks through a refractometer to check the amount of suspended solids in the raw beer.
The beer is then filtered through a diatomous earth filter.
often wrimppooled and settled again to make sure most of the sediments are in the middle of the kettle.
The final stage of the beer is, of course, when the bartender pulls back the handle on the tap, and the beer flows through 75 feet of line from the tanks in the refrigerated room.
Bradt said that the colder the beer was, the easier and more efficient the filtering process was.
Bradt said that Free State used about 900 gallons of beer a week for their events.
After the kettle is emplied, Bradi climbs down into the kettle and shovels the sediments into buckets.
After the settling process, the wort is pumped through a heat exchanger and cooled to 64 or 65 degrees on its way to the fermentation tanks. The temperature is kept at 65 degrees throughout the active fermentation process, which usually lasts the first three to five days the wort is in the fermentation tanks. The wort stays in the tanks for up to two weeks.
During the next week to week-and-a-half, the wort's temperature is lowered to 35 degrees to promote the final settling of the yeast.
Fermentation is accomplished through the use of top-fermenting yeast, or ale brewer's yeast. Bradt said the yeast was the original yeast used historically for brewing purposes.
Bradt described the yeast as a simple, single-scelled organism that digests simple sugars. The yeast's byproducts include alcohol and carbon dioxide. Bradt said that the yeast was reusable and that the same batch of yeast had been used since Free State opened two years ago.
Kegs are also available from Free State.
Richie Backus, daytime bartender for Free State, draws a beer for a customer.
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