So here they are, the pictures of the "little brewery by the lake". A photo documentation of what I must work with and what I'm forced to look at each and every day. It's horrible I know.
The first shot is of the brew house. The instruments of my production. It's the standard 35 hL, four vessel brew house but since it's a little larger than Magnotta's it's taken me a little longer to get to know the ins and outs of each vessel and valve.
But soon, I promise, I'll get to know this system intimately. And hopefully I'll be able to expertly play each vessel like a fine tuned instrument. Coaxing out sweet wort from it's mind boggling number of valves, like some crazy cat jazzman filling the stale, smokey bar air with magical floating bleets from his golden horn...blap, blap, bleep, blap, scat, bap, beep, bop, scat, blat, bleep, bleep, blap....and then behind him, rapping madly, keeping time on the tubs comes the, rap, rap, tap, snap, rap, rap, tap.....then in comes the keys on the Hammond B3 organ to fill the rest of the empty space, dink, dink, wha, wah, dink, tink, wah, wah....or something like that.
My first batch! At the bottom of each fermenter we lovingly label the beer, letting all visitors see what day our bouncing baby beer was born (Did I ever mention how much I hate alliteration?). Can you see the name under "Brew master" there? Yeah, that's me. Seriously though, I still have a long way to go before I'm worthy of such a lofty title.This particular batch will be bottled and put out to market soon, so look for it on Brewer's Retail and LCBO shelves near you.
And here it is, the view from the brew house. The creamy orange morning sky resting lazily above Kempenfelt Bay as it slowly tries to rub the sleep out of it's eyes. Oh wait, no that's me with crusty globs of sleep still in my eyes. Those gnarly, beige nuggets poking the corners of my ocular cavities. This particular morning I rushed out of the house at 515am to get to work early and hopefully get my day going quickly. Instead when I got there, used the key which I had just received the day before to open the brewery, only to find that they neglected to tell me the code for the alarm system. Oh the fun you can have standing outside a Northern Ontario brewery at 630 on a December morning with the alarm system screaming at you. It brings a smile to my face just thinking about it.
When I did finally manage to get in and shut the alarm off the sun was already starting it's ascent and I was almost a full hour behind schedule. On the plus side I was able to take this picture.
And here's the, "why is it raining and Christmas is only four days away" picture.
Seriously, this is the first time I can ever remember it raining this close to Christmas. Especially in Barrie, which is like smack dab in the middle of the snow belt....hell it's like the belt-buckle of the snow belt. My first three days at the brewery, it's snowed. Two feet of the white stuff in three days. Then over the coarse of the next few weeks it warmed up, rained and melted all the Christmas away. It's not just the weather either. Does anyone think it feels like Christmas? I certainly don't. Maybe I'm just too old to have that same Christmas feeling I got when I was a kid. I don't know. But it just doesn't seem the same. Where's the anticipation? Where's that "can't wait" feeling. All I think about at Christmas is, I get a few days off, I get to see the family and then I get to party at New Years. That's about it. No "peace on earth, good will to man" shit either, just vacation, family, drunk, then back to the salt mines. Maybe someday when I have kids of my own I'll be able to get the feeling back, but until then, what's next?
No comments:
Post a Comment