Here is the third report of my experience with the EYE program, here in Cairndow at Fyne Ales Brewery.
First of all: I’m so happy to be here! People are very nice, Scotland is beautiful and this experience is helping me to understand what I will do in the future and I can’t wait for it.
During these two weeks I’ve seen other aspects of the job, like filling beer boxes: they are essentially plastic cubes of 1m3 of volume, in which a sterile sack is positioned and then connected to the fermenter in order to transfer beer in it. The boxes are then sent to a bottling company that send us back cages of filled bottles; after that we only have to put the label on every bottle with a semi-automatic machine. That’s the routine for the core range beers.
On the other hand we have to bottle manually the “special” beers, like the ones of Origins range, that are barrel-seasoned or spontaneously-fermented beers. That’s a hard work, because you want to finish that on the same day and so you have to be quick and constant.
There was also the occasion to follow the final part of brewing a spontaneously-fermented beer: instead of cooling the wort and then transfer it to the fermenter where the yeast is pitched, they let the hot wort cool down in open tuns, called “coolships”. As you can see in the photo, they let me transfer the wort in one of those coolships!
