BREWING l
Galway Bay Brewery
I then moved on to the Galway Bay Brewery, which is marginally closer to Galway city and its traffic prob- lems! There I met with Operations Manager Will Avery, who had arrived in Galway only 18 months ago from the United States. Will had worked in the Burnt Hickory Brewery in Georgia up to then, but jumped at the chance to go on an international assignment when it came his way. Will gave me some of the history of the Galway Bay Brewery: it started in 2006 with the purchase and running of The Cottage Bar in Salthill, the seaside resort just to the west of the city limits, by the company founders Jason O’Connell and Niall Walsh. Three years later they bought the Oslo Bar in Upper Salthill and con- verted it to a brewpub with initial batch sizes of 1000 litres. This was more than adequate to meet the then needs of the organisation. However, roll on several years and the establishment of new pubs in both Galway and Dublin … and suddenly the brewlength was just too small. A familiar story! So they had to upscale the brewery to deliver 2000 litres batches. In 2015, with eight pubs selling beer as fast as they could, the decision was made to move the brewing operations to a small business park in Ballybrit, Co Galway. This time the new brewery’s brewlength would be 40hL, and after a short bidding process the contract went to Eco Brew Tech of Italy. The number of pubs is now eleven, and with a twelfth planned for Belfast in the autumn of 2017. This new brewery became opera- tional in June of 2016. However, even as I visited, the brewery was going to be expanding and improving over the next number of weeks. Will took me on a quick tour of the brewery. First up was a spanking new 30-tonne grain silo at the front of the building, to be commissioned within two weeks when a variable speed drive would be delivered. Up until now the malt has been supplied in 25kg bags to the malt mill. Loughran Family Malt of Clermont farm in Co. Louth is their routine source of quality malt but they are also supplied by Castle Malting in Belgium and Thomas Fawcetts in the UK for
My Galway Bay Brewery host Will Avery, with the three largest 80hL fermenters to his right … in the next few weeks a fourth vessel will be installed just behind Will in line with the others
the bottleneck for the new brewery was the availability of Bright Beer Tank capacity, but again this was to be resolved in short order with the doubling of BBTs from two to four in the next few weeks. In terms of other tanks they have eleven fermenters – three of 80hL, six of 40hL and two of 20hL capaci-
some speciality malts – and have been known to use Spelt, Buckwheat, raw oats and raw wheat in certain of their beers, as the need arises! Following on from milling was the Eco Brew Tech combination mash tun and lauter tun, similar to the Galway Hooker equivalent. A typical grist load would be 900kg. Will explained that Galway Bay Brewery plant
The 40 hL Kettle/Whirlpool, with wort cooler off to the right
The new 30te grain silo about to be commissioned
Interior of the mash/lauter tun showing the knifing arrangement
Some of the 40hL litre fermenters all in a row
Brewer and Distiller International z 11
www.ibd.org.uk
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