In this video Steve Hollins describes how and why he built his dream home brewery.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:35 Why he started brewing
01:06 Equipment selection
01:48 Community participation
02:31 Building the brewery
03:18 Why he went to all the effort
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Benefits of the BIAC complete microbrewery system
BIAC complete microbrewery system product page
Video transcript:
My name is Steve Hollins I've been brewing for over 25 years. My wife and I live in Eldorado, Wisconsin, in the country and we decided to build the brew house to look like an old milk barn. On the outside it looks like an old shed, on the inside it's a very functional brew house and I love it!
You don't get into this hobby to make cheap beer. You get into this hobby because you love the taste of beer and you can make it the way you like it. I love the process as much as I love drinking the beer. I just started with plastic containers and glass Carboy fermenters and then as I started to realize that I was doing a lot more, I started to upgrade my equipment and I had time to get into all-grain brewing.
We decided on the BREWHA equipment because we got one vessel, one conical vessel that does the mashing and the fermenting and it's save space, as well as it it's easy to clean, easy to sanitize, and you don't have so many hoses and pumping and opportunities for contamination. So we start out with two large fermenters, they worked really well so that after that, I think within a year, I ordered two more fermenters so we had four fermenters and I like to do a one week of 'primary' and 2 weeks of 'secondary' fermentation. So it gives me a week to turn it around and get it back and make another batch so I can make one batch of beer every week.
I like drinking great craft beer so I wanted to make sure that the beer I was going to be making was going to be up to my standard and everybody else was going to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it. Once people start drinking good beer they like good beer and and this equipment, the BREWHA equipment has helped me make better beer. Probably about a dozen people come over on Thirsty Thursdays after work and we make beer together. Well I make beer, and they sit around and sample the beer that I've made before. It's a great event that people love to come to. Different people love different parts of the brew-making you know and and everybody likes the end product!
It's very satisfying for me that people love this room because we did put a lot of details in it. We had a lot of help doing it. One of our neighbors down the road, his grandfather used to have a wood silo made out of redwood, so one wall is built out of this old silo. The ceiling, the roof, the old barn boards are from a neighbor's farm. Stainless steel milk pipe that we took out of a dairy barn to run the water to the fermenters. We got this still that we found and brought home. We've got these milk can lights that we put into here, we've got a speakeasy door in our entry door. We got a corn crib out there that was donated from another neighbor and hops grow around the outside and a fire pit in the middle.
WelI, I did all those extra things because I just think brewing for me is a hobby, and I want really good equipment, I want a really nice place to brew in. And it's important, it's the same thing with the beer I make, it's about details, at the end of the day it's the details that add up and so I think the environment that you're working in and the equipment you're working with all adds to your final product. Brewing is something that I love to do and I knew that this equipment was going to be able to help me make a better beer, and I want to be proud of what I do.