They we well-prepared for us and had ordered in all the ingredients we needed to make our Hefeweizen. The first step was to load the phenomenal amount of grain into the hopper for milling, a sack at a time. After that, everything was moved about mechanically (thank goodness).
The guys at the brewery were great, extremely friendly and didn't seem to mind that we brought along about of dozen other members of the local homebrewers club.
We spent a lot of the day peering down at various stages of the process. Here, the mash is about to begin.
After mashing, sparging, boiling, whirlpooling and cooling, the beer ended up in this fermentation tank:
We made about 30 barrels that day, if things go well Ninkasi plans to make another 60 barrels. That's more than 10,000L of beer. Because "The Weasel Ate My Venison" was too long for the label, and another local brewery already has a German-style wheat beer called "The Weasel", we settled up on a made-up word for a name - "Weizelwizen". It should be released in a couple of weeks.
