Havasu Dreaming of Mudshark

Brewing at Havasu

It’s every homebrewers dream to brew on a commercial system- seeing the way that our tiny tiny home brewing systems “scale up” to a large system is just awesome.  On a homebrew system, we use... 12-20 pounds of malt?  Imagine using 20+ BAGS for a brew.  How do you store, move, mill, and then get that into a mash tun?  And vorloff?  That’s not as simple in a 15 bbl mash tun.  Don’t even think of a gravity system.

These are the things you get to experience when you visit a professional brewery for a day as I was fortunate enough to.  I was invited by my friend James Swann who asked that I share a brew day at Mudshark Brewing with him.  His idea was to create a light, summer beer.  Using Tangarines and Horchata.  We tossed around a few ideas about how to incorporate all the flavors which were applicable, and with the help of Mitch the head brewer, created a recipe that he thought would work on his system.

On brew day, we got there at 8:00 and it was clear that the ACTUAL brewers had already been working for a while.  This is not a job for the faint of heart.  There are hoses, wet floors, boiling water, heavy lifting, forklifts, and early mornings which stretch into late afternoons.

And beer.

Lots of delicious beer.

Having an opportunity to experience this was absolutely a treasure.  Clearly, we had no “real” responsibilities.  We were eager labor which the professionals knew could wuss out any moment. Because they are professionals, they let us handle the grunt work and they SHOWED us the finesse stuff.

Mitch is a young man, this being his second brewing job.  At his first brewery, he quickly rose after being a voracious homebrewer (think... 4 brews a week for 2 years.  Voracious like that) to a keg washer in a local brewery, to the head brewer at the 3rd largest brewery in Ohio.  That’s quick.  He was the head brewer for 5 years and longed for the opportunity to flex his creative muscle.  Mitch found a path which led him to Lake Havasu, brewing with owner Scott Stocking.  Seeing a head brewer with the passion and genuine hunger to create awesome brews.  Mitch really seemed like a homebrewer who thought he just magically stumbled into a brewery one day and simply started making bigger batches.  

Mitch started the day by escorting us to the grain mill outside.  Yes, outside.  No exhaust fan necessary.  Big platform to pile bags of grain on, and for us to stand on- needed.  Mitch was quite methodical in his method of opening the grain bags.  I was unable to replicate it as an amateur, so I just ripped them open.  seemed to work pretty well at getting the grain out of the bag though.  What... 18 bags if I recall?

Remember when cloning recipes or trying to design large batches- think in terms of bags, not pounds.  It will help when you either reverse engineer or get the opportunity to brew on a commercial system.

Open bag. Pour in mill. grindgrindgrind augeraugerauger Grain level drops. Open another bag.  Repeat. 17 more times.

That was pretty fun tho, to be honest.

Grain goes up, grain falls into the mash tun, water falls into the mash tun, mixer goes round and round. Round and round. Round and round.

Our host shows us how he’s cleaning and sanitizing the fermentation tank which resembles a rocket ready for launch.  

And hoses. WOW!  The hoses. EVERYWHERE! The number of tri-clover clamps in that place is amazing.  They have 8 fermentation tanks (30 bbl I think, but they're getting additional 60 or 120 bbl tanks very soon) and 3 bright tanks.  Moving wort and beer around the facility is quite a task.

Being a tangerine horchata wit, we brought tangerines.  These tangerines would now be separated into peel and pulp.  Since mango has a nice flavor, we also brought mango, which needed to be peeled and freed from its pit.  This is a somewhat messy process for 15 pounds of tangerines and 10 lbs of mangoes, but we got the job done.

Think of it this way- you have knives in your kitchen.  Would you need a knife in a brewery?  No?  

Gosh, wish we had thought of that sooner.  Plastic knives are significantly less durable when dealing with mangoes.

James is incredibly strong though, so he made magic happen.

The mash went great.  Mudshark uses a mash/lauter tun, then transfers sweet wort over to the boil kettle.  Once a boil was achieved, hops were added.  POUNDS of hops.  After boiling for 60 minutes (out of 75) the tangerine and mango component were added, along with the cinnamon which we consider the “horchata spice” in our recipe.

This finished up and Mitch prepared the heat exchanger which brought the boiling wort to 65 degrees to transfer into the fermentation tank.  

When I asked Mitch how much he was transferring into the fermenter, he had the best reply ever- “All of it.”

Thanks Mitch. HA!

During this time, the other fellas in the brewery were bottling IPA, preparing kegs for filling, gathering product to place on pallets so distributors could retrieve it, and cleaning cleaning cleaning. 

Air conditioning is relatively ineffective, and certainly quite expensive, when the 20 foot wide, 20 foot tall garage door is open the entire day.  So these guys wear tee shirts and shorts to work.  Sounds like a pretty good move.

We sampled beers right from the fermentation tanks, off the bottling line, and some in the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time tap room.  Their current “Rockstar” beer is named SCHWING.  It’s delicious and a hilarious name too!

After our brew day, Scott and his wife Tina invited James and I and our lovely patient wives, to their home for a PARTY!  This was on a Monday, mind you.  These people have jobs.  Yet they prepared their home, went shopping, cooked, and invited the entire brewery over along with the 4 Phoenix guests.  These are not run of the mill business owners.  They are a shining example for the generosity and humanity which we should all aspire to.  This is not sarcasm.  Seriously, a couple of incredible people.

That was my brew day.  Simply perfect.