Update 12/6/2018, 1/2/2019, 5/24/2019, 4/17/2021

Still waiting (done now 1/2/2019!) for completion of our 480v 3 phase electrical installation, but it should be done very soon. Some troublesome pieces of brand new conduit were allowing water to run into the new circuit panels barring us from turning on the new power for the first time.

New columns to support our 2nd floor rebuilding are being worked on right now in a local metal-working shop, and should arrive here next week. (we have 8 of 9 as of 1/23/2019!) These were necessary to reinforce a 2nd floor that was never built for anything more than light storage, and when completed, will allow a 180 person seating limit in the 2nd floor space.

Concrete foundations were poured for the new columns about a month ago, after which column fabrication began.

Really hoping things get moving faster, because the first shipments of brewery equipment are scheduled to be shipped in the next few weeks. This includes Hot and Cold water tanks, a keg washer and keg filler, dual chillers, a 25hp compressor to run the canning/bottling line, and a bunch of LED lighting.

5/24/2019: Fermentation room concrete is poured, with radiant heat tubing installed within the concrete. Old stairwell has been removed, and lumber for new stairs has been delivered. Main floor rough-in plumbing should be completed this weekend, after which final concrete pour takes place. Experienced several week delay when plumber was about to hook up to main sewer drain, only to find the City had neglected to reconnect the building sewer when the streets were redone some years back. Arghh!

We’re here for beer as of 4/17/2021!.

New information 6/28/2018

After a series of delays, including a 5 week environmental review by the State of Wisconsin due to our brewery being built in an historic building, we should be cleared to begin building the brewery in the next week or two. Could be this Friday, or as late as July 9th. In the meanwhile, we have cleared out tons of the stuff that was in the building so that it is ready for construction as soon as we receive clearance from HUD.

We have added some brews to our lineup, finalized on a 24 tap system, completed designwork on the brewery and taproom, achieved an easement to obtain the required electrical needs, and have obtained full financing for the project.

Our downtown neighbors, Littleport and DPW and are participating in an alley cleanup behind our building called “Imagine Alley” on June 30th to beautify and make better use of our surroundings for all businesses with alley frontage to create a unique feel. Our goal is to get the city to rebuild the brick alley which lies underneath the asphalt and create a mini-mall of sorts. If any of you have shopped the brick alleys in St. Augustine, FL and in other historic locales, you know how beautiful they can be.

We are really anxious to order our brewing equipment, and will do so as soon as HUD gives us clearance to proceed.

 

 

Hot Shop Glass promotion begins!

Early supporters are ordering their own beer glasses now, which entitles them to a free beer every week for 1 to 2 years at the Littleport Brewing Company! Go to the product list now to order your glass, custom order your glass type and colors. Save $50.00 per year by ordering early!

First 12 HL Cavitation brewing system

Trial system: first 12 HL system of its kind. This system was used for testing purposes. Sadly, after production difficulties, it looks like we will not be able to obtain this system. Its promises, including all beers being gluten-free, still entice us, but the manufacturer still seems to be in product testing mode, even though our order was placed well over a year ago. It looks like we may now be forced to go with a conventional 10 to 15 bbl system.

Planning phase complete!

Financials and planning stages are complete.

Phase one (tuckpointing entire building) is also complete.

Phase 1.1: replacing windows on South and West sides of building is complete, except for the one window replacement which was sized incorrectly.

Phase 1.2: Utilities-We Energies should be installing a gas line by end of April, 2018. Building has had no heat for decades.

Phase 1.3: Concrete work: Still need to remove existing concrete floor in preparation for new 6″ concrete pour and plumbing upgrades, but can’t start until weather warms up.

Phase 1.4: Electrical upgrade: upgrading to new 460v 3 phase service, again waiting for heat…

In the meantime, I am doing whatever I can that can be done in the interim.

Brewing license from Feds has been obtained.

More coming soon!

 

Racine Craft Brewery in the Works

RACINE — For years the owners of DP Wigley, Mark and Chris Flynn, have wanted to open a brew pub or microbrewery in their historic riverfront Downtown building. Now they’re planning in earnest to make it happen.

The Flynns have signed a contract with Vern Spaulding of Orlando, Fla.-based Providence Process Solutions to design a craft brewery for what is now their warehouse at 214 Third St. Spaulding has designed numerous craft breweries including Titletown Brewing Co. of Green Bay, Barley John’s Brew Pub of New Richmond and O’Fallon Brewery of Maryland Heights, Mo.

Mark Flynn is a longtime and award-winning home brewer. The Flynns also run their store within a store at DP Wigley, 234 Wisconsin Ave., called Hop To It Brewing & Winemaking Supplies, which sells beer- and wine-making ingredients and supplies.

Mark explained that a craft brewery, or microbrewery, is not a brew pub; it is primarily a production facility, although it can have a tasting room. A tasting room is “like a bar but with limited hours,” he said.

The Flynns’ plan is to build a microbrewery that would sell beers by the keg to southeastern Wisconsin taverns. There are many bars in Racine and Kenosha, and Mark said, “Every one will be selling beer for us once we are making good beer.”

They will also bottle their beers for sale in the tasting room, he said.

Flynn sees himself taking the role of “co-master brewer” for their future craft brewery that they intend to name Littleport Brewing Co. He also said he has his brewing partner in mind but declined to identify him.

Mark said they plan to start with six or seven different beers but will also have “seasonals.” The beers will include a Welsh pale ale, an India pale ale, an amber and a couple of stouts.

Also, the Flynns plan to hold a quarterly or semiannual home-brewing contest and then brew the winner’s beer, Mark said.

Chris said they’re working on their business plan and financing with advisers from SCORE, formerly the Service Corps of Retired Executives, and the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corp.

“We’re 100 percent confident” in the project, she said.

Big ambitions
Kenosha native Spaulding is working with the Flynns to take them from the planning phase for a craft brewery through project management. He estimated that if all goes well, they could be selling beer by the end of this year or late August 2018 at the latest.

Cavitation brewing method!

Here are just some of our research notes involving this new system of brewing. We had hoped to use this system, but after some time waiting for the troubleshooting to be completed on the first prototype, we had to give up on this method. Maybe it will be applied in our next tasting room.

Clicking on the line will download a pdf to you. You will need Adobe or pdfReader to view.

One real surprising result was that most of the brews can be gluten-free.

From:     https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.06629

Beer brewing powered by cavitation

1-main

Albanese et al. – 2016 – Gluten-Free Beer via Hydrodynamic Cavitation Assisted Brewing of Barley Malts

cavitationbrewing

Ciriminna et al. -LWT2018

This Technology Is About to Revolutionize Beer-Making – MIT Technology Review

Get ready Racine!

Tiny bubbles will make you feel fine!

This Technology Is About to Revolutionize Beer-Making
The formation and collapse of tiny bubbles dramatically changes the chemistry, engineering, and cost of beer-making.

by Emerging Technology from the arXiv September 26, 2016

When it comes to beer, many readers will know what a magnificent product the amber nectar can be and why the forces of scientific progress should be focused on its constant improvement.

Over the years, there have been many advances in our understanding of the biochemistry of fermentation. But the basic beer-making process has not changed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Clearly, earth-shattering breakthroughs in brewery science are few and far between.

Which is why the work of Lorenzo Albanese at the Institute of Biometeorology in Florence, Italy, and a few pals, is so significant. These dedicated individuals have invented an entirely new beer-brewing process that dramatically changes the chemistry, the engineering, and the environmental footprint of the process that produces the heavenly brew.

So what have they done? The secret sauce in their new method is cavitation, the formation of small bubbles of vapor within a liquid and their subsequent collapse. This is usually done by reducing the pressure within a liquid so that it boils and then increasing it again so that the vapor condenses.

Cavitation can be produced by a rotating impeller which generates low pressures at its fast-moving tips. Indeed, cavitation is often an unwanted by-product of ship and submarine propellers, not least because the bubble trail, and the noise it makes, can give away a submarine’s position.

Cavitation is an extraordinary process. The rapid collapse of one of these tiny bubbles can create temperatures of more than 1,000 Kelvin and produce pressures some 5,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure. These conditions dramatically change the physical and chemical environment in water. Albanese and pals have conducted extensive experiments to find out how this influences the brewing process.

This process involves the basic ingredients of malt, hops, yeast, and water and has always been relatively simple. It takes place in four steps. The first is to create a sugary liquid called wort in which the starch from malted barley is converted to simpler sugars that are fermentable.

In the second step, the wort is drained and the malted barley washed to extract as much of the fermentable sugars as possible, a process known as sparging.

The wort is then boiled for an hour or so to remove water and concentrate the sugars. The boiling also kills off any enzymes involved in converting starch to sugar and boils away volatile chemicals that can ruin the mix, particularly the unpleasant-tasting dimethyl sulphide. Adding the hops at this stage gives the mixture its characteristic flavors.

Finally, the mixture is cooled and the yeast added to start the fermentation process, which typically takes several days. This converts the sugars into alcohol, creating beer, which can then be bottled.

Of course, the devil is in the detail. The malted barley must be milled in advance to increase its surface area. The wort must be kept at a certain temperature—usually between 50 and 78 °C—to help the enzymes break down starch.

Combined with the boiling, this is an energy intensive process. It takes about 32 kilowatt-hours to make 100 liters of beer. (For comparison, a television rated at 100 watts left on for 10 hours uses a single kilowatt-hour.)

So how does cavitation change all this? To find out, Albanese and co have built an entirely new kind of brewing facility that produces cavitation within the wort. They then conducted a range of beer-making experiments under different conditions to explore the potential advantages and disadvantages that cavitation introduces.

The results make for the interesting reading. The first advantage is that cavitation pulps malted barley and so removes the necessity for it to be milled in advance. “Dry milling of malts becomes irrelevant with the new installation, since malts are pulverized by the cavitational processes down to less than 100 µm in size within a few minutes,” say Albanese and co. This also increases the biodegradability of the spent malt, which is a waste product of the beer-making process.

Cavitation also increases the rate at which starch passes from the pulverized malted barley into the wort. This process is so efficient that little if any starch is left in the malt at the end of the process.

That has significant implications. It means that the process of sparging—the washing of the malt to remove trapped sugar and starch—becomes entirely unnecessary.

With starch released more efficiently, the transformation of starch into simpler sugars can take place at lower temperatures. “The activation temperature of enzymes aimed at transforming starch into simple sugars and amino acids drops by about 35 °C, shortening the time needed for saccharification,” say the team.

Cavitation also helps improves the efficiency of the chemical processes that usually occur during the conventional boiling of the wort and hop mix. Cavitation causes unpleasant volatile gases to degas quickly, denatures the enzymes in the wort and allows hop flavors to mix in easily. That makes boiling entirely unnecessary. Indeed, this whole process can take place at around 78 °C say, Albanese and co.

All that translates into significant energy savings. The team says its new brewing process used just 24 kilowatt-hours per 100 liters, some 30 percent less than a control experiment they also ran. And that’s before they optimize the process to prevent unnecessary heat dissipation.

One thing the team does not consider, however, is the cost of the equipment necessary to create cavitation and the maintenance associated with it. Cavitation is famously damaging. The pressures and temperatures it produces eat away at the hardest steel. Just how this would influence costs isn’t clear but must surely be factored in somehow.

Of course, the ultimate test is the product itself. In a series of tests, this brave team says that the resulting beer is just as good as the conventionally produced stuff. That’s something that will have to be independently verified by selfless individuals willing to put their own interests aside in the name of science.

If objective observers agree that the resulting beer is good, cavitation looks set to have a major impact on the brewing industry. Indeed, it may turn out to be one of the biggest changes in brewing technology in decades, if not centuries.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1609.06629: A Novel Brewing Process via Controlled Hydrodynamic Cavitation

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