Welcome to Thomas Corcoran Brew Works

The Brewing Process

Thomas Corcoran was my grandfather who was an Irish immigrant and a homebrewer. So I come by this obsession genetically and named the brewery after him. As you can see, I brew in my garage, usually with the door open, but on cold days only partially open. The brew stand is a Blichmann Top Tier™ featuring a low propane burner for the kettle, a mid-level shelf for the mash tun, and a high burner for the hot liquor tank (HLT) Also attached to the vertical post are a March™ pump at the bottom, a BrewHardware™ RIMS (recirculating infusion mash system) tube mounted next to the ghetto control panel. The panel receives 240VAC via the yellow twist-loc cable and powers the RIMS tube through a pair of solid state rectifiers (SSR) controlled by an Auber™ PID while powering the rest of the panel and pump with 120VC. The ghetto control panel is homemade and has been with me from the beginning undergoing many revisions. Present on the back side but not visible in the picture are the brew kettle and a water filter. Hanging below the mash tun shelf is a homemade counterflow chiller. A nice feature of the brew stand is its portability; tilting it over on the casters and rolling it into a corner of the garage makes room for the car after brewing.

Brew day starts with filling the mash tun with enough filtered water for the mash. After adding the appropriate minerals and acid, I heat the water using the RIMS. Water dischages from the mash tun valve through a silicon hose to the pump inlet. The pump pushes the water up though the RIMS where it is heated and back into the mash tun. As the water reaches the strike temperature, I get the grains together and mill them with a Monster™ two-roller mill. The strike temperature is calculated by Beersmith™ software so that when the grain is mixed with the water the desired mash temperature is reached. By holding the mash at an optimum temperature and pH for the enzymatic conversion of starch to sugar, the sweet wort is produced. The HLT is filled with filtered water to the sparge volume and receives appropriate water chemistry. At about the mid-point of the mash the HLT burner is lit to heat the sparge water to 170°F.

When the mash is complete, usually after 60 minutes, the recirculation arm inside the mash tun is removed and replaced with a Blichmann Autosparge™, which controls the level of sparge water in the mash tun so that it neither flows over the top or goes dry. The silicon tube from the RIMS to the mash tun is disconnected from the mash tun and replaced with a hose from the HLT. The RIMS exit hose is fitted with an extension incorporating a copper tube to reach the bottom of the brew kettle. So now we have sparge water flowing from the HLT into the mash tun; mash liquor flowing from the tun to the pump to the RIMS and into the kettle.

As the HLT empties, the burner is extinguished. As the kettle fills, that burner is lit. Typically I boil for 70 minutes, giving 10 minutes for the hot break to foam up before adding the 60 minute bittering hops. Nothing like seeing all of your bittering hops stuck to the side of the kettle above the boil by the foam; ten extra minutes is worth it to avoid that. Sometimes there are other hop additions during the boil, or sugar additions, or candi syrup, etc. At the end of the boil there is the whirlpool to force all of the trub, protiens and hop sludge into the center of the kettle so that I can draw clear wort, unfermented beer, from the edge. To do the whirlpool the wort flows out of the kettle to the pump to the chiller to the whirlpool arm on the kettle, which returns it tangentially below the surface. For IPA's and other hoppy beers, cooling water is supplied to the chiller to drop the temperature in the kettle to 170°F and adding hops. Dropping the temperature minimizes bittering while extracting flavor and aroma compounds from the hops. I usually whirpool for 30 minutes when whirlpool hopping; just a few minutes if not.

After the whirlpool, the hose is disconnected from the whirlpool arm and is attached to the in-line oxygenation setup which then sends the chilled, oxygenated wort down a sanitized line from the garage to the basement brewery cellar and into a sanitized fermenter. There the yeast is pitched to convert the sugars in the wort to CO₂ and ethanol. The fermenter goes into the fermentation chamber, a foam insulation box around a dorm fridge controlled by a Raspberry Pi and Arduino running the open source Fermentrack software. Fermentrack not only precisely controls and logs fermentation temperature, but allows the user to program temperature profiles that can ramp the temperature up to finish fermentation. A Tilt™ hydrometer keeps me informed of fermentation progress and Fermentrack includes the Tilt data on its graph. The finished beer is kegged and placed into a "keezer", a converted chest freezer where the temperature is controlled to a proper serving temperature. The two keezers and three secondary regulators provide combinations of three serving pressures and two temperatures to the eight taps. The cellar is just on the other side of the wall from the Pub bar.