Whenever somebody asks me what I do, I inevitably get the subsequent question, “So…are you a brewmaster or something?” Then I fake a laugh, say, “No, no. I’m a Cellar Man.” The reply: “Huh?”
So, I write this post in order to shed some light onto the position. In a nutshell, working in the “cellar” means you have a hand in all the production aspects of the brewery that is not the specific act of brewing beer. Most folks are surprised that there’s more to brewing beer than the brew day.
To elaborate, some of a Cellar Man’s tasks include:
1. Mill the grain – In short, the starches and enzymes that we want to get out of the malted barley are locked in unless we mill the grain. Each beer has a different recipe and I make sure the correct grain gets in the mill and in to the grist case, which then goes to the mash tun. Fortunately, we recently installed a new malt handling system so grain usually doesn’t have to be added one 55-pound bag at a time. Broadly speaking, most batches have somewhere between 700 and 1000 pounds of grains.
2. Check gravities – Fermentation is the process of yeast eating sugars and producing ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. ABV is measured by tracking how much sugar is in solution before this occurs and how much is left afterwards. I check the gravities (a sugar-density measurement) everyday to make sure the beer is coming along as it should. It also lets us know when to dry-hop the beer…
3. Dry-hop the beer – All our IPAs beers receive 2 dry-hop additions wherein hops are added into the tanks following active fermentation. This adds a great deal of hop aroma. For a 30-barrel batch, our session IPA receives a total dry-hop of 50 pounds, the west coast IPA gets 70 pounds, and hoppy, imperial styles get 90 pounds, sometimes more.
4. Tank transfers – Once done in the fermenter, I sanitize the hoses and transfer the beer to the brite tanks. When this transfer is complete, I carbonate the beer by injecting carbon dioxide into the tank. We have an instrument that measures the amount of CO2 dissolved into solution, however, we always need to taste test the beer along the way. This sounds great until you’re carbonating a 9.5% ABV imperial stout at 9 o’clock in the morning.
5. Cleaning the tanks – After I transfer the beer out of a tank, yeast and hops (aka “trub”), in a form that can best be described as a fantastically aromatic sludge, remain inside the tank. I get that out and run a cleaning cycle with a warm caustic solution. This process can be particularly gross and time consuming, especially if there are other additions such as coffee beans.
6. Sanitizing the tanks – Before we move any wort or beer into a tank, it has to be sanitized with a perasetic acid solution.
7. Keg off the beer – This is pretty straightforward, although in terms of time, this process usually takes the longest. With our manifold, I can fill six kegs at one time. A sixtel (5 gallons) takes about three minutes, a ½ barrel (15.5 gallons) is done in about 10 minutes. My record for kegs filled in one day is 167.
8. Clean kegs – Our owner and brewmaster both had the foresight to buy an automatic keg washing machine when we started. Sixtels are cleaned in about 60 seconds, ½ barrel kegs take about 90 seconds. Often times, I have to clean the outside, as well. You’d be surprised at how disgusting these things can get when a restaurant or bar is through with them.
9. Work the bottling line - We have a bottling line that can fill, at optimal speed, 1700-1800 twenty-two ounce bottles per hour. It can also fill 750 ml, 500 ml, and 12 oz. bottles but we’ve mostly only done bombers.
10. General cleanliness – Clean beer requires cleanliness in all aspects. This includes floors, exteriors of tanks, drains, draft lines in the tasting room, etc.
11. Inventory (aka cold box) management/organization
12. Putting orders together – About every 2 weeks, each distributor comes to pick up an order of kegs and cases of bottles. We have four distributors. A large order could be 60-70 kegs, while a small order is maybe 10 kegs.
13. General organization – I drive a forklift a lot. I have a system for evaluating the status of wooden pallets for which I am mocked.
14. Other duties not specified – Working brewery events like our anniversary party or new bottle releases, transporting the odd keg to and from a distributor, important things like setting up the keg Christmas tree and lights, etc
So, there it is. Next time you’re at a brewery and somebody tells you they’re a Cellar Man, you know exactly what they’re talking about.
And knowing is half the battle. Or some such thing.
