Welcome back to the BrewDeck Podcast. I’m your host Grant Lawrence joined by Heather Jerred.

Hi, how’s it going?

Doing well.

So before we jump into this amazing episode, I just wanted to let everybody know. I know we’ve been talking a ton about Euro pills on here, but it has officially made its way to the west coast. So we’ve got it available in Western Canada and the Western US warehouses. So if you have any questions about it, feel free to reach out to your sales rep. We’re really, really excited to have it out here for people to try and Grant you brewed with it. Did you not?

Yes. I brewed with it multiple times. I actually just did a Helles with it the other day that’s currently fermenting. So I love it. I mean, I get a great extract out of it, head retention out of it, and I’ve just been brewing German lagers with it and loved it.

I’ve shown pictures to brewers of that like pillowy head on that, the Pilsner you brewed and it looks amazing. So very excited to finally have it out here.

I’m going to have to get Country Malt to send me another bag to keep brewing with it. I used up what I had.

Maybe you might have to get my hands on some for me to do a home brew.

Right on. That kind of brings me to my next point. Today’s episode is all about spunding.

Yes.

For those out there listening who don’t know spunding is basically a pressure regulator that allows you to experiment under pressure and we’ll talk with a couple different brewers about it. I think it’s an especially relevant topic right now with the CO2 shortages and CO2 price increases that some brewers are seeing in kind of little pockets across the country. So we have a handful of guests on this week. We’ve got Ewan Muir from Annex Ale Project up by where you are Heather.

Up in my neck of the woods.

Up in your neck of the woods. And then Hamish Clark from 33 Acres Brewing Company. Also up in Canada.

Very close to me.

Very close to you. And then Lisa Allen will be joining us from Heater Allen Brewing in Oregon. And then finally we have Owen Sawyer from (512) Brewing Company. And we’re going to talk about CO2 capture with Owen Sawyer. So let’s get into it.

Really cool.

So for our first segment, we’re going to talk spunded lagers with a great brewery. They have a couple locations. Their brewery’s name is Annex Ale Project, and we have the head brewer Ewan Muir on today. How you doing, Ewan?

Good morning guys. Not too bad. Thanks. How are you?

Doing great. Let’s jump into it. Can you give us a brief overview of Annex Ale Project?

Yes. Annex Ale Project’s in Calgary, Alberta. We’ve been around for five years. I’ve been with the company for three of those. The three years that I’ve been here have seen a huge amount of development and growth as the whole five years that we’ve been through has seen. We do a core range of pale ales, lagers, New England and Golden Ales. And we bring out a small batch. We try every second week. And this can be from our rotating sour series to collaborations. We have two footers, which release bottle conditioned beers from as regularly as we can get them out. And we do sodas as well. So we also double up as soda production facility as well. So we do Ruby, ginger beer and lemonades, things like that as well.

They have a little bit of everything, sour, sodas, ales, and in the name, but then these spunded lagers I hear about.

And it sails by name, but we do have of pretty wide range of brewing styles. And the idea was originally that it was more an ale focused brewery, but as trends and tastes have developed, we’d like to say that we get into anything that tastes good right now. So we have a core lager, an Italian Pilsner called Idle Hands, but we also throw a small batch lagers as well, pretty frequently.

Right on.

I miss drinking Idle Hands all the time. I’m not going to lie. I’m excited to come back to Alberta and get my hands on it.

You got to get back then.

I know it’s so good.

So Italian Pilsner. So I take it’s dry hop.

It’s dry hops and fairly substantially is got a good bit of hop character to it as well, but it’s smooth as crisp and we’ve edited it a couple times throughout the years. We’ve had this around since probably for about two years as part of our core range. And it’s a real hitter, especially with the summer community. It’s a strong patio beer. We’re very happy with that at the moment. And it’s been going well this year.

Sounds nice. I think some brewers out there might turn their nose up to a dry hopped lager, but man, they really hit the spot. I’m a huge fan of Italian bills.

Exactly. There is something to be said for a lager that’s just left to do its thing and just condition without those hops. But if you want to add that special, that unique character to a lager as it’s coming with, especially with those Italian Pilsners, it really develops pretty unique character that… I mean, it is just been flying this summer, so it’s in a good place at the moment.

Awesome. All right. Well that kind of leads me into our main topic of spunding, which Heather tells me Annex does quite a bit of with their lagers.

We don’t often do actually with our core lager just in terms of being able to spund so many tanks at once, but we do do it frequently and we do do it with every small batch lager that we do. We actually do it with ales as well.

Very nice.

Not that frequently, but especially when we’re having a secondary fermentation, it’s really handy for that. But our first spunding experiment here was on October 1st of which we’re actually bringing back for this October 1st as well. And ever since then, we’ve introduced it where possible. And it works great.

For the listeners out there, spunding refers to essentially using a regulator like a little spring loaded device that maintains pressure during fermentation and uses the CO2 to naturally carbonate the beer. Can you tell us a little bit about your setup, like your spunding rig, where did you get it, that sort of thing.

I didn’t actually realize until right before this morning that spunding is a direct translation into German of banging. But I think spunding sounds a lot better. So it is literally just a, banging doesn’t really work. It is just a small fixture that you can place onto the blower fan of a fermenting beer. We usually wait until aggressive fermentation is over and then slap it on. It really takes very little kind of preparation or infrastructure to set it up. Because it just works on, you just add it onto the tank in place.

(07:47)
We have spunding valves from GW Kent. They’re the only style that we have in at the moment. And they’re perfect. They’re regulated. So you can release the pressure on the spring. So set your own pressure that you’re wanting to set inside the tank and we have a couple of them and they’re very easy to put on. I mean, that’s the best part about it. If you’re tracking your beers nicely and you know what point is best to throw on to achieve the desired effect. Then you can just do it in 30 seconds. Just add it straight on to the tank.

Right on. Is that, I’m guessing since you said you use it on ales and lagers, do you have a general SOP of when you put them on during fermentation after or so far in fermentation or is it just recipe by recipe or how do y’all set that up?

It’s usually recipe by recipe. When we do it on secondary fermentations, if we add in a fermentable intern an already fermented out beer, we will put in our additions and then add on a spunding valve and let that secondary fermentation right throughout with a spunding valve on it. Actually this morning, I spunded one of our lagers that far earlier point in fermentation just to see how it goes, this conversation got me thinking about it.

(09:20)
So usually we’d wait until the aggressive part of the fermentation was over. I would say after five Plato of fermentation is completed once there’s still a very obvious pressure built up within the tank, but not so much that it’s going to create a dangerous pressure level inside or you just want to get that krausen out of the way first, and then that’s the point where we’ve been usually putting it on.

That way the krausen doesn’t, I guess, clog or get into the spunding valve. So it sounds like for a typical lager, about a eight, nine Plato or eight to 10 Plato. Let me take that back. Call it, I’m thinking in specific gravity in my mind here. So it’s trying to do conversions as I talk. So like a 10, 12 Plato lager, and then you’re saying after about five Plato fermentation, throw the spunding valve on

That’s traditionally what we’ve done. It kind of depends on how the fermentation’s going as well. Depends how slowly it’s picking up. If there’s been a firming of lag, you might want to get on earlier. But usually, I would say for anything to start, say at 12 Plato, we would throw it on around seven or eight. This morning actually I put it on a 10 Plato gravity beer, just to see how much carbonation as an experiment we can conjure up inside that tank and just see how close to finished level carbonation we can get it. But usually I would say seven or eight Plato beer would be the point that we would add that on.

Interesting. Just doing my own research for the show, I realized that everybody uses a little bit differently and I couldn’t find any definitive stuff in the literature about it. It’s just kind of up to the brewer.

It is. One of those things that does seem to be very much within the realms of playing about with it wherever it seem to be appropriate. I was telling Heather that when I first began brewing, I worked in a brewery in Scotland where we spunded everything lagers and ales and so it was everything in between. That was just our SOP for brewing. At that time, I assumed that it was standard brewing practice everywhere in the world and that every tank always received the same treatment, but at a certain point it’s not necessary specialists. If we do for a lot of our tanks here, we’re going to dry hop substantially without something like a hop gun that we can introduce hops without getting rid of that pressure. It doesn’t seem to be necessary everywhere, but like you said, there are lots of different techniques and it does seem to be open to manipulation where needed.

Gotcha. That’s a good point about the dry hopping, I guess we’ll get back to that. But you can’t really dry hop something with a bunch of CO2 dissolved in it, you’re going to have problems with the geyser.

Exactly. I know that it is possible with some sort of vessel that you can inject them through, but it’s something that we haven’t got around to trying, or maybe we scared of, if it doesn’t quite work, then we might have a bit of a mess.

Could ruin a batch with… I’ve used those hop guns professionally and they’re awesome. But you do have to have some kind of way to measure DO because if not, you could just be blasting dissolved oxygen in your beer.

Exactly. There’s a bit of a gamble at some point, right.

For sure. Very interesting. So at your original brewery in Scotland that you first worked at, did it for everything including ales. And when I’m thinking of ales, I’m thinking of you want fruit Esthers and that sort of things, I’m guessing you used a lower spunding pressure for ales trying to suppress them.

For sure. I think I can speak with confidence on the values, but I would imagine also translating from bar to Psi, I think it would be roughly, we’d set a lager at 10 Psi and ale at 5 Psi. That would seem about right looking back at it. It was a long time ago and it was one of those stages where introduction to brewing techniques and it was all pretty new, but I think you’re right. The reduction of pressure instead, an ale would be the more appropriate for that.

Gotcha. Did you find that, I’ve never spunded an ale personally, only lagers. When you spund an ale, for instance, did you still get that flavor expression that you would out of, I don’t know what, yeast you were using a Scottish ale yeast. I guess.

It was in the reigns of, it was more like a Californian ale yeast at the time. It would be hard to compare because we did it literally every time. I have noticed it on lagers that we’ve been experimenting with, that it does create that real clean finish. I don’t know if you would know that from your experience as well. It does seem to create less Esther production are more of a crisp, clean finish, especially suited towards those new styles.

Right on. There are some interesting flavors from yeast, I think in lagers, but getting Esthers like some fruity flavors is definitely not what I want in my lagers.

Definitely. And especially at the end of fermentation when maybe if you’re changing the temperature as well, it might have a small effect and probably a lot of it can be corrected in a fermentation style as well, but it definitely would make a difference, especially with a yeast that really is prone to Esthers like that.

Can you speak a little bit to the actual carbonation that it produces in the beer? I know we talked a little bit about it earlier this week. Do you see a difference in the carbonation? Do you see a difference in the mouth feel of the beer when you’re doing spunding versus not?

Yeah. I definitely notice that. Actually looking into finding out any legitimate articles on this phenomenon and it doesn’t seem to be scientifically supported that, but it does seem to be subjectively agreed upon that there is a definite difference to that mouth feel. The carbonation is just more natural. I can’t think of any other way to put it, smooth, finer bubbles. And the fact that you can usually avoid doing a lot of force carbonating in your final package product, it helps for a number of reasons, but definitely the mouth feel is a lot smoother, I’ve found, the bubbles are a lot tighter and it’s more creamy I suppose, is the way to put it.

(16:57)
I definitely would agree, but I can’t find any scientific evidence that this is legitimate outcome of the spunding process, but it does seem to be agreed upon subjectively. I don’t know of, I’ve never done it in my professional experience, but being able to accurately attain a consistent level of carbonation through spunding, like a final finished product level of carbonation, I found it difficult to be able to get consistent values on that. I don’t know if you’ve ever had any experience where you knew at what point you can set a spunding valve to create a perfect carbonation that will be attainable by the end, just through that process.

No. You just try to get as close as can without overshooting. Right. Because if you overshoot, you’ve got more problems.

Exactly. That’s my experience as well.

Do you have some sort of, there at Annex, do you have any way to measure dissolved oxygen or CO2 digitally?

No, we don’t. We’ve used a couple from suppliers, but we don’t actually have one in house that we use regularly. Although it’s something that we’re aiming to do in the near future.

So you’re basically after spunding your measuring CO2, I’m guessing with a Zahm & Nagel, something like that.

Exactly that. Yeah.

Cool. Let’s talk about CO2 savings and recapture a little bit. I did a little bit of napkin math here before the show and in a home brew batch. So in just five gallons, fermentation puts off about 1.8 pounds of CO2 for five gallons fermenting. So I just kind of extrapolated that up to 10 barrels, which I would say is a pretty common craft size and it was about 111 pounds of CO2 is output 10 barrels, fermenting. And that’s just like for something in the longer range.

(19:10)
I mean, that’s pretty obvious how much CO2 you save by spunding. I mean, like you were saying, you’re not spunding for the entirety of it, but you’re getting pretty close. So after your spunded fermentation, and then whenever you have to carbonate, I mean, how close are you typically getting?

How close our way to that finished level of carbonation?

Yeah. I’m guessing your lagers are 2.8 volumes or 2.7 volumes, something like that.

I would say we get them well above to the point of maybe 2.4, 2.5. I think we actually brewed Maxi lager with our friends at Establishment, our neighbors next door. So we brewed that in June this year for our neighbor day. And we managed to get that a fairly high level of carbonation before we even began packaging or before we even measured it initially. But there was numbers that you’re saying there. I imagine if you extrapolate that throughout 12 months of brewing on and off season, that would be substantial savings, both financial, environmental. And just in terms of being able to take that process and keep it into a product that is going to be a better quality product.

Absolutely. Another question that comes up a lot around spunding or what I’ve been seeing on the different brewers forums across the internet, when people bring that up as a possible solution to the CO2 shortages, a lot of people say their tanks aren’t speced properly to spund, to hold pressure. How did Annex tackle that? What kind of tank spec do y’all go for?

Well, all of our tanks are speced for a higher pressure rating than we would ever reach with spunding. I’m aware that it’s a problem that does affect a lot of breweries on that smaller scale though. All of our tanks are pressure rate to at least I believe 25 Psi. So there’s always going to be capacity for us to, I mean spund maybe to 15 Psi with room to spare. We also have individual PRVs pressure release valves on top of all of our tanks to avoid a problem that would be far greater than on carbonate beer.

(21:45)
So I understand that it is a fairly large issue and that comes down to being able to inject that capital expenditure at the start of brewing with a mind to what might be happening further down the line. I’m not sure the solution, if all those tanks are going to be rated to a lower point than you’re wanting to spund that, it might be a difficult work around there.

Right. I guess lot of, some of the more inexpensive tanks are, I think a lot of them are only rated to 10 Psi, so challenging to spund and actually be able to capture any CO2 in it safely.

That’s what I’ve heard as well. And I’m sure that’s going to lead to problems. Even if it’s a tank packaging off of there or transferring into a different vessel. It might be, I mean, it is not a lot of range to work with. So it’s probably uncomfortable reading for a lot of breweries that may have that smaller rating on, but the possibility of spunding is going to be a finer range. Isn’t it?

Yeah, for sure. The price of CO2, I don’t know how it is in Canada, but down here, at least down here, the price of CO2 is really increased over the past two years. So I would think the ROI on spinning a little extra on your tanks up front these days would pay for itself quickly.

Absolutely. I was speaking earlier about how I went through a CO2 shortage in my time in the UK, it was a couple years ago. It happened actually during a time when there was the world cup soccer tournament was on and all the bars in the United Kingdom had basically ran the country dry [inaudible 00:23:39] technically how it was. It was also really hot summer and just everyone was obviously thirsty. And I didn’t know about it until that time, but the powers that be hold back a certain amount of CO2 in the country to be able to deal with nuclear power stations. So there was a nuclear power station near Edinburgh on the east coast of Scotland, which kind of at a certain limit, just soaks up all that extra volume. So the smaller companies don’t get their hands on it and it all gets stored for something that we hope never happened.

(24:19)
So we had to shut down production for a couple of days until we got deliveries in. And as I was thinking about it this morning, if we had been spunding all year up until that point and containing all of our CO2 and reducing how much we forced carbonate things, we maybe have been able to get through those couple of days of packaging. So it is interesting how much difference it makes when you add up, like you were saying those small numbers from a home brew system. If they were implemented across the craft brewery for a year, the savings on that could be huge. Especially when you’re talking about the financials of CO2 being so much more expensive this year than pre COVID levels.

Anything coming up with Annex that you want to plug.

So we have a collaboration with another Calgary Brewery coming out very soon. Next week we have a season like our hybrid coming out next week, which you guys have to keep a lookout for it. It’s going to be lovely. And then we have two food or beers coming out before the end of the year. So we are looking forward to getting some wild fermented, bulk conditioned beers into people’s hands, definitely in time for Christmas anyway. So there’s a couple of really interesting things coming out.

Right on.

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much guys.

Yes. Thanks for coming on, Ewan.

Thanks so much for coming on.

Our next guest. His name is Hamish Clark. He’s the head brewer at 33 Acres in Vancouver, BC. How’s it going, Hamish?

I’m pretty good. How are you?

Doing well. You spund, basically all of your beers, right? Everything that’s not dry hopped, is that correct?

We spund all our lagers here. We have two breweries right next door to each other here in Vancouver, 33 Acres and 33 Brewing Experiment. And between the two of them, we spund all our lagers.

Being that you spund so many different beers, can you tell us a little bit about what you feel spunding adds to it? What’s the pros there?

I think for us, the thing that really drove us to spunding is the textural quality that it adds. The carbonation just has a smoother finer texture that we prefer. And the beer is just a little better overall, the least amount of messing around with a beer carbonating that you can do by force is better. And we think lagers definitely took a jump up when we started spunding.

That’s definitely been a trend with other people we’ve talked to about it. It’s just like that mouth feel on it. And the effervescence is just different and better.

It may be intangible for some, but I think we definitely pick up on it. It’s just a small detail that we prefer.

When you say it improves the mouth feel, one thing that we’ve kind of been hearing so far is that it’s creamier, would you agree?

Yeah, just a finer texture, I guess, in carbonation that it’s not a natural level of creaminess, but just a little softer and less, just smooths out a little bit around that profile.

Less of that. That carbonic bite that you can get sometimes.

And I think level of carbonation definitely contributes to that, but for many under pressure or spunding is definitely… It’s just slightly different. It’s the same with bottle conditioning versus force carb for a lot of beers.

Sure. Do you notice anything about head retension at all? The difference between spunded and non spunded?

I think the real gain in that area is if you’re spunding and the unitanking reducing transfers, we really saw a difference. We’ve only done a couple of small things like that for seasonal draft only releases. Our tanks aren’t set up as unitanks, so it was things that weren’t critical in terms of production timing. We could have a little bit longer to top the carbonation up via head space. We really noticed the difference for those. I think that’s where the real advantage in spunding comes in is if you’re able to unitank.

So you’re saying, are you serving off of the yeast, leaving the… Spunding in one tank and then serving off of it or?

Just packaging off that tank.

Packaging off of it.

Directly off that tank and reducing a transfer to a packaging tank or broad tank.

Got it. So just less steps, less transfers and then getting.

Less. The gently you can be with the beer, the better. Different breweries have different force carbing techniques. And some of those can be slightly damaging to beer and spunding kind of reduces that impact for sure.

Right on. We’ve kind of been hearing that as well, but surprisingly, I couldn’t find any hard literature on that. Have you ever seen a scholarly article about that or is this just from practice from seeing it done?

On which part?

Spunding and head retention or transferring it, that sort of thing. And I guess beating up the beer by transferring it around and force carving it.

Not so much on head retention, I think. Definitely when it comes to aromatics, the least amount of CO2, you can force into the beer and potentially pass through the beer is better for aromatics, but for head retention, not so much. I think mostly movement of beer is the big one for that to me.

Very cool.

So is this something that 33’s always done or was this brought in recently?

Pretty recently we’ve been operating since 2013. So our nine year anniversary just passed and we started spunding about a year ago. It’s something we talked about doing for a long time and we’re interested in. We’ve spoken to some friends around town, the folks at Steel & Oak spund a lot of their beers. So we kind of checked in with them. And then we brought on a brewer who was trained in Germany and he had some experience at Ben Owens and he really had the experience and just kind of helped us over the line with it, took control of it, which was great for us and really set us at ease. And it’s worked out really well for us since then.

Sweet.

Right on. So it sounds like you went from basically not spunding anything you said about a year ago and now you’re just, you’re all in on spunding, it sounds like.

Ben’s a very big proponent of it and he would spund anything he could get his hands on, even the things he dry hops. Because I think the German training runs strong in him so he’s great.

That’s awesome.

But I think through the breweries kind of production history, we’ve done different versions of it. For a time, we kind of just sealed tanks a little early sort of 0.4 to 0.5 of a degree Plato above terminal or expected terminal and just let it ride that last little bit of fermentation out and just build up a little bit of head pressure and we would see some carbonation from that, but that was mostly just a little bit of pressure to help with yeast harvest and things like that.

Absolutely. So what is, if you don’t mind sharing, what’s 33 Acres spunding regimen?

So most of, we have three different lager brands between the two breweries here in Vancouver. All of those will get a slight free rise in their fermentation temperature towards the end. And then we’ll throw on the spunding valve around four and a half, four degrees Plato, depending when we catch it. And then it’s generally set to one or 1.1 bar, which is around 15 or 16 Psi and we just let it ride out to its terminal.

So what do you think for your lagers, would you say that suppresses Esthers? Would you say that that makes it kind of cleaner tasting, like less flavors from the yeast overall spunding versus when you yeast and not spund?

So we run two different lager strains, one for each brewery. They each have a house lager strain, and they’re both very clean in terms of Esther and kind of sulfur production. It’s a very small amount. So it’s kind of indistinguishable the difference in Esther profile.

Gotcha. You mentioned sulfur though. I’ve heard a few brewers and one of their things about spunding and knowing how to do it is they’re worried about capturing sulfur and having sulfur sit in there. But it sounds like from what you’re saying, that the sulfur kind of is towards the beginning of fermentation and by adding the spunding valve later on, the sulfur’s already blown off, would you?

Like I said, our yeast strains don’t produce a huge amount of sulfur.

So just typically isn’t much of a worry for you.

For us, it’s not much of a worry. And it’s part of the reason we chose those strains. I think yeast selection there is kind of part of that. So I can’t really talk to solve for production much. For each brand, and the two yeast strains, we have a different fermentation profile for each one in terms of starting temperature. In Celsius, it could be between nine and 12 degrees and then all of those will free rise up another few degrees above that partway through fermentation. It kind of depends on which day of the week it falls if someone’s here or it could be, it’s mostly around six degrees Plato Gravity they’ll get high bump.

How high do you let it rise?

Probably another couple degrees Celsius. So it’s not much. And again, our yeast strains are great and we don’t spend a lot of time waiting for diacetyl to clear up. They’re a pretty quick turnaround, which is great.

Another thing I’ve heard about spunding is that it can speed up the overall fermentation curve. I mean, about how long do you take to go, I guess, grain to finished, ready to be filtered beer.

We’ll usually get to terminal and past BDK within 10 days for our lagers.

That’s awesome.

That’s crazy.

And then, again, each brand gets a different amount of lagering time. I think another thing we’ve noticed with spunding is how the beers drop clearer a little better. I think the pressure at the tail end of fermentation and going into conditioning with that carbonation, they definitely drop brighter in the fermenter than they did before taking on spunding.

Right on. It definitely does sound like spunding would speed up versus a typical no head pressure fermentation.

Atmospheric.

Let’s see. I guess last lastly, when you spec your fermentation tanks, is there a certain thing that you tell your tank supplier for spunding?

All of our tanks are right into the pressures when we apply to them. So it wasn’t really a concern for us, but it’s definitely something people should be wary of if you’re trying to spund at a higher pressure than your tank’s [inaudible 00:37:29] to. It’s obviously a pretty huge safety concern.

Excellent. Well, thanks for coming on, Hamish.

No problem. Thanks for having me.

So our next guest next segment is with Lisa Allen from Heater Allen in Oregon. Lisa, how’s it going?

Good. How are you guys doing?

We’re doing well. Cheyenne’s on with me and she tells me that Heater Allen does basically all lagers and a lot of spunding. Is that true?

Yes, that is true. We technically do make two ales, one, but other than that, it’s all lagers.

Awesome. So can you tell us a little bit about Heater Allen’s just system in general and why you chose to brew beers the way you do?

So Heater Allen, it’s actually a family brewery. So it was started by my dad, Rick Allen, back in 2007 and I came onto the brewery in late 2009. After the point, he had decided that there was a market for craft lagers and he started out on a nano system. And then the only system I brewed on before the system I currently brew on. So I never brewed on the nano system, I said that in a confusing way. Sorry.

That’s all good.

I never brewed on the nano system. We had a seven barrel pub system. And then brewed on that for a while. And then now we have a 15 barrel JV Northwest system that is three vessels. So we have a mash mixer, a lauter tun, and then a brew kettle.

That probably made things a lot easier. The pub systems, those are the ones where it’s like a hot liquor tank is under the mash tub. Is that right?

Yeah. And actually the way we would brew beer on that system, because we didn’t have a way to heat. We’ve always done step mash and we didn’t have the ability to heat the lauter tun, so we would actually mash into the brew kettle at all and then we would pump it up over back into the lauter tun. The mash mixer is a lot nicer.

Yes.

I bet.

Much more easy. So step mashing, you do quite a bit of those with your lagers?

Yeah. Pretty much every beer we make is step mash.

I guess let’s jump in and talk a little bit about spunding. How long have y’all been doing spunding at Heater Allen?

We’ve been doing spunding since we pretty much started. I think it was, it’s kind of a very traditional German way to carbonate your beer. Because carb stones are relatively new in the art of brewing and so everyone had their different way to carbonate beer. And so we’ve always utilized spunding. We haven’t always had the spunding valves that you see a lot of people have them nowadays. They’re a lot more common. We actually did not have those for a long time. We would just be like, oh, it’s close to finishing, shutting the tank.

Gotcha. So I guess before they were just kind of readily commercially available even in the US craft market. Cool. Do you have one type now across the brewery? Just the sort that go on with just a TC fitting, is that?

Yeah, we have, it’s a Barby + Kuhner spunding valve that has, it’s kind of the one that looks, it has a little spring that you can see and it’s in a little plastic thing that those are kind of the bane of my existence because they break frequently. So I always have to have quite a few on hand. They don’t break frequently. They’re just not the most durable things in a brewery, they can get knocked and all of that sort of stuff.

Can you give me any kind of what you believe spunding adds to the beer in terms of mouth feel or Esther suppression in your lagers, that sort of thing?

I think with spunding, you do get a finer carbonation. So it’s a smaller bubble essentially a little bit finer and that adds a nice, I think to the mouth feel. It’s kind of drinking a really nice champagne that has those little bubbles on the tongue you get. It’s a little bit different I feel like than what you get from using a carb stone. And I actually should say one of our ales we did recently. I have tried to spund it before and it does not… It’s one really hard to catch. So with the spunding process, we’re essentially closing off the tank at about one degree Plato from final gravity approximately. And so our Bavarian style wheat beer is really hard to catch it for men’s way too fast.

So fast.

And so that one I did use carb stone for. And I did notice, I feel like the beer head, when you’re pouring it and stuff also isn’t as, it’s not as fine, it’s not as dense as, what’s the word I’m looking for.

No, interesting. That’s something that we’ve heard from a couple of the other brewers that we’ve spoken with as well, is that the spunding process helps with the head development as well.

I think you get a little bit better head retention as well.

That’s very cool.

I take it. You’re just using, I don’t know, a Zahm & Nagel or something to measure CO2 after spunding.

Right now we pretty easily with our method get pretty close to 2.6 volumes of CO2. And usually some beers, it differs, but usually for most of them it’s right around there and that’s what we use a mobile Canoe and that’s kind of within their spec. The beers that get much higher than that can be more difficult to can. Even though I would like a little bit higher C2.

Sure. I guess off the top of my head, I don’t know, most lagers, I would say around 27, but so 26, 27, you’re kind of splitting hairs there. You’re pretty much where you need to be, it sounds like. So you must be able to get it pretty cold with your Glyco system.

We’re kind of set up in a weird way, but we’re getting our cold room. So we have a lot of lagering tanks, just single wall lagering tanks. It’s just one of the things about being an older brewery is a lot when we wanted, we would’ve preferred horizontals, but people didn’t really make them at least in the US.

That’s a good point.

So we have a lot of single wall tanks and so we have a very large cold room that has these tanks in it and it gets down. I think it’s about 35. I wish it was a little bit colder than that, but.

I don’t know if Cheyenne told you, but I’m here in Texas and it never gets to 35. So you’re really, your Glyco systems down here are working. I think there’s some craft brewers down here that would kill to get to 35.

I’ve noticed Lisa that Heater Allen is pretty Ford facing with the production styles that you do with your lagering and you have a lot of information on your website about your production practices. So with spunding, is that something that you guys like to share a lot with your customers and explain that process to them? Because I do see that you have a lot of information about lagering in general on your website.

I mean, I think I would say that it’s there for the people that want it. I think that. I mean if we’ll say that we naturally carbonate and stuff like that, but I think that information is a lot of the time more there for people that are kind of more nerdy about it. But I feel like if you put these, there’s someone out there that wants it.

For sure.

Well, thanks for joining us today.

Of course.

Our next guest is a little different than our other guests. Instead of talking about spunding and funding regimens and that sort of thing, I wanted to address saving on CO2 from a different aspect. And I brought on a good friend of mine, Mr. Owen Sawyer from (512) Brewing in Austin, Texas. Owen, how’s it going?

Doing really well. Thanks Grant for having me on the show.

Absolutely. I was doing some digging, doing some research about this earthly labs. I keep seeing earthly labs over and over again, their CO2 recapture machine. It kind of seems like they’re really leading the pack in terms of smaller craft size CO2 recaptures. And I hear that (512) has one of them.

We do have an earthly unit. Yes sir. We have a, it’s named CC, CC. I’m not sure what that acronym is actually means. We’ve had our unit, geez, was probably spring 2020 when we got our unit. We were really happy to get on board with them based here in Austin. It was kind of a no brainer and then really doing some work that we really believe.

Real quick. Can you tell us a little bit about (512)’s production size and your setup there.

Definitely. Last year we did 7,000 barrels. Before the pandemic, we were up over 10. So that’s kind of what we’re used to and that’s what we were planning on when we got the unit. Also before the pandemic, we were draft only. So it was definitely, we put out a lot of beer, mainly 120 barrel fermenters, which bears on some of the stuff that we’ll talk about later is the only reason why I bring it up. 30 barrel batches as well. Just so that the listeners get an idea about how many brewers we do a day and then how much CO2 that’ll get you back out of the unit when we talk about that just a second as well.

Absolutely.

(512) Brewing Company turns 14 this year as well. So we’ve been around for a while in Austin. Feel like we’re one of the people that have been here for a hot minute.

One of the OGs.

So to speak. Primarily doing ales, but we’ve also branched off and do some lagers here in the last couple years.

Right on. So I know that (512) has always been really big about your environmental footprint and really conscientious of that, but obviously the CO2 savings aspect, but what are some other reasons why you would want to recapture CO2 in the brewery?

We have always taken our footprint very seriously. As you said, Kevin and Sarah brand, the owners of the brewery feel that minimizing our impact on the environment is something that we should try to focus on every day, as much as we can. So that was definitely part of it when we started thinking about the Heather unit. CO2 is a problem in the environment anywhere, in sense, breweries basically just most breweries, just spew CO2 out of our tanks whenever they’re fermenting, we thought it would be smart to go ahead and capture that stuff that usually just vents off into the atmosphere and reuse it. So that was the main driving force. You know what I mean?

(50:50)
Is just to say, well I mean, we hear all this talk in the world about CO2 and how it’s helping to warm our planet and what could we do. And that seemed like a no brainer to us. Amy George from Earthly Labs originally came to us inquiring about capturing our CO2 from our boiler stack. And that was the first conversation that she had with Kevin Brand. And Kevin said, “Well, I mean, you could do that, but we got the CO2 right over here. That’s a little bit more accessible and it’s just naturally produced CO2. So maybe you should take a look at something with that.”

(51:37)
And then she came back around. I’m not sure how much longer it was, but came back around with kind of a prototype. And we had a prototype system here. I think it was probably a couple years before we got our unit, maybe 2018, something like that. We did and so did AGB here in Austin kind of helped her get through some of the workings of the unit. It was nice to be a part of the Genesis of that and whatever facet we were, but then to kind of realize this goal of not dumping CO2 into the environment. That was pretty cool.

For sure. I’d say you guys and a lot of the other Austin brewers that have tried these things and installed them successfully. It seems like Austin was a little ahead of the curve here. Because Earthly Labs is probably selling a bunch of these devices, especially with the CO2 shortage that people are seeing. I mean, there’s just lots of buzz about Earthly Labs on various brewer boards lately. So really cool.

There are a couple of us here. I know ABW has one as well, Austin Beerworks. Once you sit down with any or if they have a salesperson now I’m not sure. And kind of start thinking about what they do and what they can offer you. It is kind of a no-brainer as long as you have that capital to put up, you will see an ROI and not too bad an ROI. We have two years cash positive and then three years you’re basically making money by not buying CO2.

That’s the same ROI you would get on silo malt for instance about, I mean it is a no brainer, it sounds like. Okay.

It’s pretty solid.

Especially with, I mean, that’s probably, what’s your napkin math there. What you’re listening off your figures. That’s probably not even accounting for the increased price of CO2 lately too. Because it’s really spiking up.

Exactly.

Even like home brewers see it, like a five gallon CO2 tank. I think the local home brew shop here wanted 30 bucks to fill it, which is just insane.

Well, and then you’re up against it as well. Almost every brewery out there I’m sure is like us in that we are in a contract. We’re in a contract with our supplier for five years and there’s all kinds of very specific ways that you have to get out of it. So there’s nothing you can do about price increases. You know what I mean? It’s not like you could shop around and find another supplier. You’re in there, you’re in bed. So if you take that monthly CO2 bill, which for us is several thousand dollars and you think about that in a payment terms, if you can put the money up front, it really does make sense financially.

Very cool. Well, for those out there who haven’t seen it, can you describe the footprint and the setup of the unit?

Yeah, of course. So the CC unit is probably six and a half feet tall, six feet tall. It is approximately four feet deep and four feet wide. So it’s not tiny, but they do come on wheels. So they’re very maneuverable around the facility.

Like the same refrigerator, I guess.

A big one. One of the nice big ones.

A nice one.

One of those nice new fancy ones that are way expensive and then you’ll have a doer behind it that comes with the price of the unit. What we did and what most breweries do, I’m pretty sure as Bob with Earthly Labs, did a lot of the installs. This is how he told me to set it up. We run trunk lines from all over our facility back to the unit and we have stainless steel, 55 gallon drums. We have two of those that are back there by the doer to collect foam just in case there is some carryover from [inaudible 00:55:55].

In your lock, basically.

Exactly. And you have another one near the tank that’s actually fermented. So there is a 55 gallon drum that’s right at the unit or right at the tank that’s fermenting. So CO2 headspace gas will come out of the tank into a 55 gallon drum that’s right by the tank. That’ll go in down to just any blow off bucket that we’re used to seeing. And then the gas will come out of that 55 gallon drum and come through. We have a cyclase with a bunch of steel wool to try to catch some liquid vapor that’s coming out of it. Then now off of that tube, it’ll run all the way across our facility. And we have, our sellers a little unique. We run this thing probably a hundred feet and inch and a half just PVC tubing that runs over to the other foam traps that I mentioned.

(57:01)
It goes through those and then it’ll go through a heat exchanger to try to cool down the CO2 to help precipitate out some liquid. Liquid is a big issue with this unit. So you have to have a heat exchanger there that cools it down. And then it goes into the unit. It’ll run over some heaters that will bake off any VOCs, any nasty smelling volatiles. And then it goes through a carbon filter to scrub out some other ones and then it gets compressed and it goes through a big old air conditioner basically. Has a really big compressor that pushes it through this AC unit that cools it down to the point with which it turns into liquid. And then that liquid goes into the doer. And then as soon as it’s in the doer, it’s just like any other doer that you brewers out there have seen in half.

It looks like a big CO2 tank.

Exactly. Then it’s ready to rock and roll. Then you have CO2 that’s as pure as it can get. You know what I mean? It hasn’t been-

And beer derived versus like petrochemical derived.

Petroleum.

Petroleum.

Which was another one of the really big selling points for us with the owner’s stance on the environment and renewables, all of that. It really did just kind of check all of our boxes to try to move forward with it.

Very cool. That’s funny. It’s so relevant right now. Even just carbon capturing and stuff. Like John Oliver had a show about it just the other day. He talked about carbon capture and how the carbon offsets can be shady. And this is just a really cool way to try to reduce greatly reduce probably at your brewery, how much CO2 you have to use. So are you able to, out of the amount that you recover, can you… What percentage of (512)s operations can you run off of just what you recover?

A hundred percent.

Awesome.

If everything’s going well and we’re rocking and rolling brewing, we have slow periods of the year just like any, well, maybe not like any brewery, but we do have slow periods of the year. Some of those guys out there just don’t stop. And if we’ve kind of tailed off on production just a little bit, you may not be able to cover everything, but if we’re rocking and rolling and I have 120s every week.

Just stacked fermentations.

Exactly. And I mean, with the unit, one of the drawbacks to the unit is that it does take quite a bit of force, headspace and fermentation force to get it to turn on and to get through its cycle of getting down to temp and then starting to produce liquid. So you do need what we found with our system. And this could have a lot of variables that come into play. You need 120 barrels of fermentation going for us. That could be two 60s or obviously one 120. So we have some 30 barrel tanks here in the brewery that were our first tanks. We have three 30 barrel tanks. And those just don’t even really get it to turn on. It just doesn’t produce enough to get this thing going.

Interesting. It makes smaller systems. Like you mentioned ABGB and they have the smaller system. I’m sure you guys have, I don’t know, middle of the road system or something like that.

I think ours is just the normal one. We got one of the early units because we kind of were in on the ground floor, so to speak, with Earthly Labs, helping them with some of their prototyping of how they were going to set this thing up. And I know that they were working on smaller units, so I’m sure that they have other options now. For us, this was the one that kind of made the most sense. And we didn’t know that it had that limitation when we bought it. I don’t think that it would’ve stopped us from buying it. You know what I mean? That was just something that we learned coming through the system and just kind of going through our test phase once it got into the facility.

It’s got a big compressor on it. Like you were saying, is it pretty loud when it’s running?

It’s not.

It’s not?

No, the compressor. Now they went through an iteration where the first compressor that we got on this unit was a little loud. It was a little loud and it was a little undersized. Like I said, we got this unit very early on.

You got a like Gen 1 or something like that.

Exactly. And the unit and the compressor that they had on it didn’t struggle to get up to the pressure that it runs at, but it wasn’t very happy running at that elevated Psi. So now the unit that we have is-

It’s probably a scroll compressor if it’s quiet.

Exactly. It’s a big German scroll compressor. Exactly. And they got this one over from Germany. So it is a higher dollar, very, very robust, awesome, quiet system. The loudest thing on the system is the air compressor. There’s just a little pancake compressor to run the pneumatic inside the unit. That’s the thing that you hear the most. It’s releasing its pressure after charging up, that’ll scare anybody that’s near it. Because it’s just a very sudden in a brewery where you don’t usually hear that necessarily. If you’re standing there not knowing it, it’ll make you jump a little bit. But that’s it, the rest of it is.

Like the hiss of the actuators inside of it turning.

Exactly. But the compressor, since we got that upgrade, it’s been super solid.

So going two years strong and stuff, I’m guessing the PM, the preventative maintenance on it’s pretty minimal. Just make sure it’s topped up with oil or something.

The preventative maintenance on the compressor is very low, very low. Because it is not, I don’t think it even…

Is it oil free out of that?

I think it’s an oil free compressor. I don’t think that it has oil in it, but that is not my specialty. So I wouldn’t talk too much about that.

Fair enough.

The PM on the unit, the main PM on it is keeping the activated carbon, that is the final scrubbing of the gas changed. That’s the only real kind of headache for the unit, you have to change that. If you’re really rocking and rolling, you’re putting a lot of gas through it, you have to change it every two weeks or it will get saturated and you’ll start getting some VOCs through the compression and through the cooler, through that chiller into your doer.

That makes sense.

So you really need to put that on a PM and make sure that you’re keeping up with it. The compressor also doesn’t like liquid at all, because if it’s running at these really, really elevated Psis, 140, 150 Psi, any kind of little liquid that goes in there, you can blow a seal pretty quick. And we found that out the hard way that you really need to make sure that you’re keeping it dry, dry, dry, dry.

All good pro tips here. Cool. Liquids don’t like to be compressed.

It’s pretty much impossible, but the design is really, really a good design for what it does. It’s a heck of a system and it’s really, it is, to my knowledge, the only one out there on this size, this scale.

Same, that’s the only thing that I’ve kind of seen. So really great to have you on to chat about it. Any new things or any events coming up that you want to mention on the podcast today?

Well, we always have our anniversary party at the end of the year. We missed 2020 for very good reasons, but 2021 and this year we’ll have our anniversary party in November. We’ll be rocking and rolling with that.

Well, thanks for coming on the show today, Owen.

You’re very welcome, Grant. No problem. Thanks for inviting me.

Want to sent a great big thank you out to our guest this week. Ewan, Hamish, Lisa and Owen, and of course, to Grant and Cheyenne for coming on board as well. Couple quick notes before we wrap it for this episode, you may have heard, but stay tuned. We are really excited to be launching our new web store experience for country mall group, and that’s going to be coming next week. So stay tuned for that. And Grant, I think you’ve got a little bit of a recommendation for the upcoming stout season.

Absolutely. I think everyone out there is planning their next seasonal, be it fall or winter and dark beers are on the horizon for likely most brewers. If you’re out there, you’re considering your recipe, you’re deciding which roasted malt to use, consider giving BESTMALZ roasted malt a try. All of them are debittered, they’re made from a very high quality starting malt. They’re roasted in small batch sizes. And I mean, they just really give you that pleasing, chocolate coffee flavors without that kind of ashy bitterness you can get sometimes in a roasted malt. They’re roasted specifically to be more sweet tasting, more chocolate, more coffee. So if you want to learn more about that, we did a podcast about them last year and we called it Dark Side of the Malt. It was season two, episode 24. Give it a listen.

That’s a really, really cool malts launch last year. So really excited to get back into dark beer season. One other note, don’t forget to pre-order your veterans blend that closes on September 9th. So make sure to contact your sales rep to get that on the go. And that’s it for us. Really excited for our next episode. We are going to be coming to you live from Hop & Brew School in Yakima Valley. And I’m really excited to get down there for hop harvest time. Thank you for joining us on the BrewDeck Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and we’ll see you next time.

See you.