Haydts Brewing

Well, I did it.  I survived Sierra Nevada’s Beer Camp.  While it was technically only two days of beer-themed events, my head is still spinning with the amount of people, places, information, and beer that I was exposed to while out in Chico, CA.  I was definitely “the guy taking pictures” in our group, but I felt that if I didn’t do so, my inebriated memory would fail me.  I curated my selection to (quite) a few pictures that generally goes in chronological order and best captures my time at the brewery.  Each picture will be captioned to give a bit more insight.

I’d like to believe that listening to a song or two while browsing this gallery will help you wrap your head around my giddy  recollections of Beer Camp, so I’d suggest New Radicals “Get What You Get” or  Quad City DJ’s “Space Jam Theme Song”.  I mean really the only logical choice is the Space Jam song, but I’m gonna leave the New Radical suggestion up in the hopes that you really pay attention to the lead singer’s dancing in that video.  It’s A+ work.

Obligatory shot of Sierra Nevada’s hand wrought copper kettles, only this time with an emergency response fire team on location for some unknown alarm going off!

So shiny, this view is from the catwalk in the center of the room.

While everyone was discussing our beer recipe, I was drinking an extremely fresh kellerweis from the world’s tiniest glass.

Oak foudres just sitting around, waiting for some beer.

“Small” bottling line, packaging an Ovila Quad with sugar plums, I believe (it was really loud).

Bottles.

Gigantic wet mill for crushing grains and hydrating them at the same time.

Whole cone Cascade hops added to the 200 barrel brew kettle.

This looks like a face.

Underneath the massive brewhouse.

Counterflow plate wort chiller.

View of the East brewhouse control panel.

Original label art.

Original label art (Celebration Ale)

Original label art.

Original label art.

Original label art.

One of the most awesome piece of tech at the brewery, an inline hemocytometer that counts live and deal yeast cells as beer passes through.

Absurdly fresh Torpedo. Interestingly enough, this beer didn’t have a huge “jump out of the glass” aroma that you come to expect from really fresh DIPAs. But man was it delicious and bitter. That’s Byron, our super chill main liaison for the entire journey.

One of many hop “torpedoes”. Beer is circulated twice through these canisters to extract hop flavor and aroma.

Underneath the 800 bbl fermentors.

Cellar communication.

Lots of stainless steel.

Another awesome piece of equipment, a CO2 reclamation device. Drastically cut their purchase of CO2.

Dunno.

Forget what this thing does, but it was in the Quality Control lab and was really dusty.

Shaker table for fast ferment tests.

These are spores that survived the entire brewing process and were found in bottles of Pale Ale. Not harmful to humans.

Lactobacillus Rex gettin’ Thor-smashed.

Yeast bank!

St. Clairveaux Abbey, still under construction. The stones used here are from a defunct abbey piece by piece. The travelled from Spain to SF, ending up here in Vina, CA and are being funded by the profits from Sierra Nevada’s Ovila Abbey Series.

St. Clairveaux Abbey

Not sunny California like I had hoped. Sprinklers.

Road sodas on the way to St. Clairveaux.

I was initially overwhelmed by the prospect of trying all these beers, but I was up to the task.

Spend grain being loaded up.

St. Clairveaux Abbey also had a winery on premise.

Specialty malt room.

Bulk malt silo control panel.

Interesting barrel projects. Tequila barrel aged Gose?

This is a diagram of the massive hop freezer. There are five full-time employees whose only job is to break up bales of hops for the brewers.

Hops weighed out and ready for brewing.

Pano of the hop freezer.

200 lb. hop bale.

Shh, secret stuff.

There were more hops on the ground than I use in an entire year.

Dry hops for Bigfoot Barleywine.

These were really tough to break apart, there was even a special “tool” which was basically a giant rod to stab the bale.

❤

Yours truly pouring a bag of malt I had to carry over from the West brewhouse. What is this, some sort of nano-brewery? I should have had access to a golf cart or something.

Grain room in the 10 bbl pilot brewery. Those are our specialty grains to be added to our 8% abv cedar-aged wheat IPA. We used a bunch of cool hops, including a wild variety for dry hop (Neo Mexicanus) found growing wild in New Mexico.

Our brewsheet.

We all got to ceremoniously add hops to our brew.

4-vessel pilot brewhouse.

Summit hops in the boil (bittering addition)

The bowels of the pilot brewhouse. It had all the bells and whistles (including an internal and external calandria) in case they wanted to modify the larger brewhouses.

Cellar info. You can maybe see the info for the test brews of Beer Camp Across America collaborations with breweries like Victory, 3 Floyds, Cigar City, etc.

Separate Japanese cellar equipment housed even more pilot test batches. One of my favorites was the Employee Beer Camp English Mild brewed with Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire yeast.

More cellar notes.

Special Celebration bottles. (Jereboams?)

Special Celebration bottles. (Jereboams?)

Kickass.

Powered by beer.

This giant composting machine (called the Hotrot I believe) composts all the brewery restaurant waste (plus other stuff) in only ten days!

Biodiesel. Only like 2% of the fuel used for local deliveries came from this, but it’s a start.

When hop growers from the Pacific Northwest came to Sierra Nevada they commented on how clean and new their hop picker looked. This is because it only gets used for the brewery’s small hop fields which supply the Estate Ale series.

Stacks on stacks on stacks.

Keg Alley.

There was something special about this updated beer bike, but I can’t remember now.

Bottle labels.

There were bottling 2014 Bigfoot when we visited the “big” bottle shop.

Pano of the main bottle shop.

Bottle shop.

Nice collection.

Mumbo jumbo.

Spent torpedoes being cleaned out.

Quality control lab.

This machine breaks down hop oils into single components and then has a tube (foreground) for the tester to smell it.

Hop oil “smell” chart

Sierra Nevada is doing groundbreaking hop oil research.

Test batches of unfermented wort from the Mills River, NC brewhouse.

One of my favorite parts of Beer Camp, sensory analysis.

Preparing for analysis.

I was scared my skills wouldn’t be up to the task.

2/2! Funny sidenote was a story about how nervous a bunch of BJCP judges were when they went through this analysis during part of their Beer Camp.

Time to get nasty.

Most of the Beer Camp #118 crew.

Gratuitous shot of my daughter enjoying the insanely large amount of Santa stuff (while Mommy takes a brewery tour) owned by Mrs. Sierra Nevada. There were multiple rooms. I’m talking a lot of Santa stuff.