SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — Step one to brewing a beer, if you ask Timothy Shore at Buried Acorn, is grabbing a beer. He started his brewery back in 2017 and advised that before someone should even think about starting a brewery they need to develop their palate or taste for beer.
“Your sensory ability, to taste it and identify when it’s not quite right or maybe when you want to tweak something,” said Shore. “The most important tool you have is your senses, both smell and taste.”
Once you are prepared to start brewing you need at least four ingredients: barley, hops, water and yeast. There are also numerous steps to the brewing process that Timothy showed us including mashing, the boil, fermentation and canning. The barley is involved in the first step which has the seed go through a mill before being augured into a mashton.
“And it basically has a perforated screen type of mechanism on the bottom that allows you to separate the physical barley seed from the liquid you’re trying to extract from it,” said Shore.
Next up is the boil kettle after resting it for about an hour. After the process of taking the approximately 750 gallons of wart to the kettle a 90 minute boil will begin which then brings in another ingredient.
“In this time you add things like hops for bittering which you would add at the beginning of the boil and then hops for aroma or flavor would in right near towards the end 10, five minutes or in what’s called a whirlpool,” said Shore.
That whirlpool process requires a slight chill from the 212 degrees but works for hazy IPA’s which have a big aromatic component. The heat exchanger comes up next which produces cold wart and hot water. The hot water is reused for cleaning or even later brews.
After the heat exchanger its is time for the fermentation vessel where the yeast is added at an identified temperature. The sugar consumption process then occurs over a few days where the yeast makes, as Tim put it, a mess of the beer which requires a resting time of an additional week. If it is a beer like an IPA the vessel also is when dry hops are typically added.
“Dry hops are just pelletized hops, they call it a dry hop but it goes into the tank, its wet I don’t know why they call it dry,” said Shore. “We will put anywhere from two to four pounds per barrel into the dry hop to get get these different aromatic components, different texture, different structure to the beer.”
Chilling down to 31 degrees and adding bubbles through using carbon dioxide are the final steps before the beer is ready to be packaged. It can go to any of three places.
“They go into cans, which most of our IPA’s go into cans,” said Shore. “And then we also goes into kegs, we sell beer around town to other bars. And then some of our beer, an IPA wouldn’t, but some of our beers do go into oak and they age there anywhere from nine month to four years.”
By Oak he means oak barrels and these barrels are for aging the specialty products, the harder to find beer that Timothy wanted to be apart of his brewery. IPA’s and lagers, though make up the bulk of beer produced by Buried Acorn since those potentially 4 year long specialty beers are far less cost effective.
