Our draught beers are manufactured in-house using the highest quality brewing equipment and ingredients and without the use of any artificial additives, preservatives, foam enhancers or industrial enzymes.
Our brewing techniques are a combination of the old and the new, incorporating the “Craft of brewing” with the “Science of brewing”.
We believe in quality over quantity and allow our beers sufficient time to mature before packaging.
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Stage 1. Milling
A beer recipe will consist of a combination of various malts that will produce a certain amount of sugars and predetermined colour.
These sugars and colour compounds must be released from the malted barley kernel.
This is achieved by crushing the malt in a mill which exposes the embryo inside.
This milled malt is then ready for the next stage. |
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Stage 2. Mashing
During mashing the milled malt is mixed with water at a specific temperature and allowed to fall into a vessel called a mash-tun.
The resultant mix of malt and water is called the “mash” and looks something like a bowl of warm porridge.
This mash is allowed sit at temperatures between 65 and 68 degrees celcius whereby the native enzymes in the malt will break down the malt starch into simple sugars and other yeast nutrients.
This liquid containing all the simple sugars is called “sweet wort”. |
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Stage 3. Lautering / Sparging
To ensure all sugars are extracted from the malt it is necessary to add more hot water to the mash.
This is known as “sparging” and the temperature and chemical composition of this water is extremely important.
The sweet wort is continuously removed from the mash tun and pumped to the kettle. This is known as lautering. |
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Stage 4. Wort Boiling
The collected wort is then boiled in a kettle and the various hops are added.
The amount of hops added is determined by the level of bitterness, the hop flavour and the amount of hop aroma required in the final beer.
Boiling takes about one hour and the wort is now known as “hopped wort”. |
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Stage 5. Fermentation / matuaration
After boiling and whirlpooling the hopped wort is pumped to a fermenter through a cooling system (plate heat exchanger).
This allows the temperature of the near boiling wort to be reduced to our fermentation temperatures, (12 degrees C for lagers and 20 degrees C for ales).
The yeast will start growing in the wort immediately releasing alcohol, carbon dioxide gas and various beer flavour compounds.
After fermentation is complete the beer is cold conditioned for a number of weeks before filtration.
This cold conditioning (held at –1 degree C) is known as maturation and allows any harsh beer flavours to mellow. |
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Stage 6. Filtration / Racking
All our beers are filtered bright to commercial standards through a horizontal leaf diatomaceous earth filter.
This filter will trap most of the remaining yeast and the chill haze precipitate that results from cold storage.
The beer enters the filter cloudy from the fermenter and exits the filter bright and clear on the way to the bright beer tanks.
After adjusting the carbonation level of the beer it is then connected to the beer dispense system and dispensed directly from the bright beer tank to the bar taps. |
