B. United International Inc. - Burton Bridge Brewery

Brewing Process:

Maris Otter or Pipkin malt is crushed on a 2 roller Bentall mill (bought at a farm auction), then manually lifted and roused into the Mash Tun along with the heated incoming water from the town’s water supply. Mashing in 420 kg of malt takes 3/4 hour of hard physical labour! The wort is then allowed to drain through the false bottom - originally a stainless steel top to one of the fermenting vessels until its edge was ground and 9000 3/16 th” holes drilled with a Black and Decker! The sparge arm was made by converting an Ansells horizontal tank CIP unit.

The wort continues via an underback into the 14 barrel copper which uses a 450,000 BTU per hour gas-fired tubular burner. Natural gas is burned and drawn through a 4” pipe circulating inside the copper.

There are 9 fermenting vessels of various types and sizes. The 7 barrel. capacity plastic vessels came from Cotleigh brewery in Somerset one cold January day. In fact one of the vessels became so brittle with cold, it snapped and rolled to the hard shoulder of the M5. Quickly checking that there were no identification features on the stricken vessel, it was rolled out of sight and the journey continued.

The yeast was selected from the National Yeast collection catalogue, now based in Norwich. Properties such as quick fining and comparatively slow fermenting were sought.

By chance, the final selection also had a wild yeast killer factor and the characteristics give enough fermentation control to enable priming sugar to be unnecessary.

Picture: Bruce of Burton Bridge during brewing.

New cultures are propagated from slopes supplied by the NYC. The frequency of new cultures depends on the results of the weekly microbiological survey. The yeast is usually acid-washed prior to pitching.

Fermenting takes 5 days, after which the yeast is skimmed off, and 12 hours later the beer is chilled to 12°C. The beer is then pumped to an outside Racking Tank and then racked into steam-sterilised casks. The brewery owns some 20 barrels, 350 Kils.