The brewery is all about beer. Kiln, MS has historically been the bootleg capital of
Mississippi. Following in that grand tradition is our brewery.
We have converted what was previously a warehouse into Mississippi's first brewery
offering off-site sales. In the picture below you can see our brewhouse in the
foreground and our fermenters in the background. We have a virtual tour available for
those that can't make it to the brewery.
The image at left is a satellite image of Kiln, MS.
Just to the Northwest of the intersection
between Hwy 603 and Interstate I-10 is the
Stennis International Airport Industrial Park.
The arrow, which we painted on the ground just
for this photo, marks the spot.
Diamondhead is visible on the far Eastern side
of the photo, and the mouth of the Jourdan River
is visible on the Southeast corner.
I thought the puffy white clouds were a nice
touch.
The building is rather plain, and we
prefer it that way. Our business is
brewing beer and we wanted a
place where we could focus on just
that.
Located in the industrial park we
renovated a vacant warehouse that
originally housed wood pallets and
spools built by the previous tennant.
Surrounded by natural pine trees
and in close proximity to I-10 and
other shipping routes this location is
perfect for our needs.
The brewery is split up into four basic sections, office, brew house, cellar, and cold-room.
The office is 600 square feet of completely underutilized space as it is dedicated almost entirely to activities only marginally related to brewing
(i.e. shipping, receiving, mail sorting, etc...).
The brew house is a 15 Barrel (450 gallon) single step infusion system. It is heated with low pressure steam generated by our 7HP boiler.
The cellar consists of four 15 BBL fermenters and six 15BBL conditioning tanks. The tanks are jacketed with cooling coils so that we can
control the temperature, with insulation surrounding the cooling coils, followed by a stainless steel skin for protection and cosmetics.
We have almost 1000 square feet of cold room for storing kegged and packaged beer before shipping it to a distributor.
Our brewhouse is a 15 barrel (a barrel is 31 gallons) batch system
capable of converting about 1000 pounds of grain into the best
tasting wort you can imagine.
The brewhouse consists of 3 tanks visible in the picture at right.
The first tank in the picture is actually two tanks stacked one on the
other. The bottom tank is a steam jacketed hot water heater
allowing us to create our strike and sparge water (more on that in
the virtual brew page).
The top tank is the Mash/Lauter Tun. The motor on top runs the
rakes (which help push spent grains out the man-way door and stir
the mash). The Mash/Lauter Tun is basically a collander or seive
that allows us to mix hot water and milled grain together. The
combination makes sugar water that we then can drain from the
bottom of the tank through the seive.
The wort (sugar water) is then transferred to the kettle where we
boil the wort with hops to make a sweet hop tea (another great
Southern Tradition--sweet tea). The wort is then cooled and
transferred to the cellar.
On the left side of the picture you can see four fermenters
with cone bottoms. Each fermenter holds about 450 gallons
of actively fermenting wort. The cone bottoms allow us to
harvest the yeast at the end of fermentation to start the next
batch of beer.
Once fermentation is complete we transfer the contents into
one of our six conditioning tanks shown on the right. During
the transfer we filter the bulk of the yeast out. The beer then
ages and carbonates in the conditioning tanks. Once
carbonation is complete we package the beer for sale.
The conditioning tanks have flat bottoms. The reason is that
cone bottoms are expensive and sense we have already
harvested the yeast we don't need the cone bottom.
Each of these tanks is cooled through an external cooling coil
wrapped around the tank. The coiling coils are then
insulated and then a stainless steel skin is wrapped around
the vessel for protection.
I think our cold room is the biggest beer fridge in
Hancock County Mississippi. Someone else may have
a bigger fridge with beer in it, but ours is dedicated.
Once the beer has finished conditioning we fill kegs and
party pigs with the beer and store them in the cold room.
The cold room is kept just above freezing to maintain
freshness. The cold room is actually kept colder than
our recommended serving temperature (43F).
Don't we all just love the office work. A large part of
brewing is record keeping. Not only do we keep
records for tax purposes, but we also have to keep
records of brewing schedules, recipes
formulations, transfer schedules, due dates, you
get the idea.
The one bright light is the Lazy Magnolia that
hangs on the wall. Its a constant reminder of what
we are doing and what we are trying to achieve.
(Ben Franklin)
