Brewing in Singapore

One man's adventure of brewing beer in Asia.

Monday, September 04, 2006

First Brew

We (successfully) brewed our first commercial brew today on the 30 hl system. We brewed the Trader's Brown Ale. I had help from Ben (our new assistant brewer) and Ernest (my Contractor/home brewer friend), we were even visited by the Brewmaster from Tiger next door (Juan) and the General manager for APBS (Alan). They both hung out for a while and helped us put the Gula Malaka (palm sugar - pictured here) into the brew kettle. It is nice to have friends drop by and help out a bit. It was a bit of a challenging day, including (but not limited to) 4 burst air lines, missing raw materials, a caustic shower (because I am not yet familiar with which valves should never be opened in sequence), a nonfunctional automated water mixing device, boiling water down the boot, the shifting of the mini brewery to downtown, a semi-functional wort cooling system and assorted acid/caustic burns. It took about 12 hours - but we brewed beer ! It felt great to finally brew beer on this system. And we plan on shaving about 3 hours off tomorrows brew (he said hopefully).