Kit & Caboodle; Pilot plant & 50L tiny plant

Welcome to the first in our new blog series exploring the equipment used at Brew HQ to make all the delicious beer you know us for! Through these blogs, we will explore the brew process from beginning to end and the exact equipment we use at each stage, why it is important and what it does. Some will be uber techy and might be exclusive to BrewDog, others will be standard brew process elements (e.g mash tun or fermentation vessel) but we will look at our equipment in place for each of these steps. These blogs should give a decent look behind the scenes and see what we're doing everyday and the attention we pay to the kit we use. We'll also make sure we include a few handy homebrew hints and tips along the way where we can!
 
Before we start on the stages for all our big brews, the first in this series looks at our 50L tiny plant and our brand spanking new pilot plant.

50L tiny plant
If you've been to a pilot brewing event in one of our bars or one of our AGMs, you'll probably have met this bit of kit before. Our diddy set up allows us to make demonstration brews and present the brewing process on a small scale. It's a fraction of the size of our brewery, but essentially does all the same integral processes on the size of a trolley. Many of our brewers also use this kit to brew little batches of homebrew, too, so it's got a load of uses!
 
Franz gives us the lowdown;
 
"This kit consists of a hot liquor tank, a mash/lauter tun (in an all-in-one vessel) and a kettle. There's a gas burner under every vessel, a pump to recirculate the wort in the mash kettle and a pump for transfer to fermentor (wortcooling). There's also a small plate heat exchanger, so it's everything you need for a mini brew in one condensed unit.
 
We've been using this kit since about 2011, and alongside doing little brews as demos and personal projects, we use it to test any weird ingredients we're keen to use. Things like herbs and spices we've not used before. Unpredictable stuff.
 
Misspent Youth is a great example of a brew that was created on this kit originally and then scaled up to a 20L batch in Fraserburgh. The kit has had pretty much every beer style going pass through its vessels though!
 
Most of the Ellon teams' upcoming pilot brew competition entries will be brewed on this kit, so it's going to be in demand over the next month!"
 
Wanna see the tiny plant roll on down to your local BrewDog bar? Hit us up in the comments!

Pilot plant
This caused quite a lot of happy dances when it was installed a couple of weeks ago at Brew HQ, this is our brand new pilot brew kit! Now we've got our brewery taproom rocking and rolling, we thought it was time we opened a mini brewery for visitors to get elbow-deep in hops and try their hand at brewing. We'll be calibrating the kit with a batch of Punk IPA in the coming weeks, and once we've done some fine-tuning it'll be ready for some guest brewers (aka you!) to head over and help us out!
 
Here's what our brewery engineer Alain had to say about it
 
This kit will be set up to brew experimental batches replicated to a 1/10 scale of the big brewhouse. This way, any brews can be replicated exactly on a bigger scale if they come out as a success! There are five fermentation vessels, one bright beer tank and one brewhouse. The brewhouse is basically a mash kettle, lauter tun and wort kettle all-in-one. It has a top and bottom chamber; top is the mash kettle and lauter tun, bottom being the wort kettle. It's a pretty neat little set up! It's Bowman’s baby, but will be used by all brewers for different beers.
 
Head over to DogTap, our onsite taproom, later this year to check out the pilot kit in action!