Plastered in the brewery

I have re-plaster skimmed the walls to a higher standard than when I first converted the old workshop that is going to become the brewery. It was fine for me when working on beer recipe development as a homebrewer, but a much better wall finish is required now to make them easily scrubbed. As I often say, ‘brewing’ should be called ‘cleaning’ instead as sanitation is the task brewers spend a large percentage of their time working on.

Solid foundations

In its previous incarnation as a workshop under the previous owner, they had installed a pedestal drill in one corner. They had cast an extremely stable, reinforced concrete base for the machine.

Whilst I was doing the workshop up the first time I had decided to just box the concrete base in as it looked like a major job to remove it.

I placed a chest freezer on top of the boxed in base to serve as my hop freezer and keg chiller for can filling operations. It served well enough like that for the time I was homebrewing.

As my fermenters will be on castored bases for ease of moving around, that raised concrete base was taking up valuable floor space so I decided to go ahead and remove it.

I’d recently purchased an Evolution R230DCT concrete disc cutter for various blockwork cutting jobs and in the end it took three good days to disc cut, sledge and hammer drill out the concrete. The dust created by the cutting operation was phenomenal, but the disc cutter is a fantastic piece of kit which so far, I can highly recommend.

My neighbour kindly lent me his Einhell RT-RH-32 rotary hammer drill another brilliant piece of kit that was easy on the arms when chipping away at the base.

The huge effort was well worth it as I now have a smooth floor section in the corner where I can roll in a fermenter as required.

A couple from Plzeň

One of the days that I was working on removing the base a lovely couple appeared down at the house. They had recently arrived in Orkney and had heard there was a brewery here. As they were already in the area they had decided to drop by. Word gets around said the man with a smile.

I felt sorry that I had to disappoint them with the fact that the brewery wasn’t built yet, never mind being open! We had a short chat and it turned out that they were visiting Orkney all the way from Plzeň (Pilsen), the home of Pilsner in the Czech Republic.

They had visited Orkney brewery already, but had not heard of Swannay so I suggested that they head up to their brewery if they had time, but in any case to make sure that they tried Scapa Special which as you know is my favourite pale ale from Swannay.

Storm Floris

In August we were hit pretty hard in Orkney by storm Floris with power outages across Scotland as a result. We lost a few of our willow trees. They were still heavy with lush foliage when the storm struck so there was quite a bit of cleanup to do in the garden in the days after.

I took this picture of a poor family of ducks being pummelled and swamped while trying to cross Widewall at the height of the storm.

The Churchill barriers have thankfully and rightfully seen nowhere near the number of closures that we’ve had in previous years, but this time, the decision was made by the police to close.

3D printing fail

Back to the brewery build and there are a few metal protrusions in the brewery wall which are too difficult to remove so I’d decided to box them in with 3D printed covers so that there are no sharp edges remaining on the walls.

I completely fluffed the prototype design in Blender, the software I usually use to design my printed parts. I didn’t make the case walls thick enough. As a result I came back to a huge pile of spaghetti some time after I kicked the print off as the print completely delaminated and collapsed. I cancelled the print and Octoprint cheekily awarded me a new achievement.

It’s back to the drawing board for the cover designs. I hope to do a better job next time.

Black Rabbit beer tasting

Continuing my recipe development work for my planned range of beers, I tasted one of my homebrews which had now been maturing for a couple of years.

I’ll make some subtle changes to tweak the recipe in the direction I want it to go next, but Black Rabbit will make a lovely winter warmer and will definitely form part of the line up of premium beers I’ll be producing.

Sadly last year saw almost all of our rabbits wiped out by myxomatosis.

This included our one and only black rabbit.

I was brewing this beer on the day that our postie was chatting to me about our black rabbit. At the time I’d not settled on a name for the beer I was brewing that day and so it seemed appropriate to name the beer in honour of it.

A visit to Stronsay

Lastly, I’m always keen to spend time on an Orkney island, especially one I’ve not visited before.

The opportunity came up to head to Stronsay for the day. It did not disappoint and the weather was spectacular. We have had such a great summer this year.

As with many of the Orkney islands Stronsay has amazing sandy beaches and dramatic cliffs.

We ended our visit with a short walk to the Vat of Kirbister and its impressive rock arch. Then it was back to the village of Whitehall to wait for the ferry whilst watching the local monks load up their boat with supplies from the village and head back across the bay to their monastery on Papa Stronsay.