BREWING WITH "the Prof"
I have brewed in several breweries and visited dozens more. Some are extremely manual and others have a degree of automation that massively simplifies things and also allows a higher level of precision.
When I decided to start brewing my own beers I looked at a few breweries I could use including de Proef brewery in Belgium. This business was set up by a Belgian brewing professor and experienced brewer Dirk Naudts. A fairly innocuous exterior (in the middle of some fields) hides an elegant, modern stainless steel brewery and some excellent equipment. By microbrewery standards, there is a very high level of automation making it possible to control the process with acute precision. Each volume, timing and temperature can be exactly programmed.
Using this brewery I have been able to, for example, change a mash temperature by one degree and look at the effect this has on the finished beer. This kind of thing is feasible using a more basic set-up but it’s much harder to achieve consistently from batch to batch.
From mashing in to bottling, everything in the brewery has been designed to make the beer taste as good and fresh as possible and to ensure it won’t fall apart a few weeks or months after packaging.
A good brewer shares similar traits with a good chef - he must think of how ingredients can be processed to interact to give various tastes, aromas. textures and colours. Perhaps even more than in a professional kitchen someone in the brewery must have a scientific understanding of the process. Brewing beer is an ancient example of biotechnology - the use of microorganisms and biochemical substances to perform specific industrial or manufacturing processes. People have been malting and mashing barley (biochemistry) and allowing yeast to convert the sweet liquid obtained into beer (microbiology) for millenia but only relatively recently the science has been uncovered to elucidate what maltsters and brewers had been empirically doing (with varying degrees of success!)
Working with de Proef allows me to apply scientific brewing principles in a hi-tech craft brewery to produce artisanal beer of impeccable quality.
