1860. That’s how many days it would take to drink your way out of a 15BBL fermenter. That’s assuming you only drank a couple pints a day, but let’s be honest… you can do more. We’d see you sooner than 5 years after you fell in the fermenter. I mean, it’s only 3720 pints to get through! Assuming you aren’t selfish and drink all of the beer in a 15BBL fermenter yourself, we will be able to fill 30 kegs every time we brew into these tanks. That is a lot of beer that we can share with all of you – 465 gallons of beer to be precise.

As you can imagine, to make that much beer these tanks need to be pretty large. It took a semi truck, a forklift, a rigging team, and a crane to get the tanks into Trek. Each tank is almost 10ft tall and 5ft in diameter. You can check out this video of the tanks arriving at the brewery yesterday. We’ve talked about the pilot system we’ll use, but these tanks will be for our big brewhouse. These will keep the taps full of all of your favorites.

To fill the tanks, we’ll need a lot of our core ingredients. As a home-brewer, or on a small pilot system, we think “how many pounds of malt do I need?” But to brew a 15BBL batch, we now think, “how many sacks of grain do I need?” A sack of grain is 50-55 pounds. Our beers will use almost 2000 pounds of grain for a 15BBL brew. Our hop additions will also change from ounces to pounds. A single brew could use a few dozen pounds of hops.

Though the amount of ingredients is hugely increased, the amount of time that it takes to brew a 15BBL batch of beer isn’t really any different than brewing a 1BBL batch of beer. The amount of time that it takes to brew a beer can be broken down into two parts, brew day and fermentation. Brew day is when we make the wort to put into these tanks. That will take 8-10 hours. Fermentation is how long it will spend in these tanks while the yeast do their magic. Fermentation will take 1-3 weeks depending on the style. Tack on a little extra for conditioning and packaging and the beer is ready to be enjoyed!

So what needs to happen to fill these beautiful tanks? We still need to get our 15BBL brewhouse in place. That won’t happen until our friends over at Seventh Son complete their awesome expansion. In the meantime, we’ll get the chilling setup for these tanks and get them positioned. We’ll be able to begin brewing on the system over at Seventh Son, and we’ll truck the wort back to Trek, pump it into our tanks and begin the fermentation process. As soon as we get our final state approval, we’ll begin that process, and as soon as we have enough beer, we’ll be able to enjoy it with you!

To keep up to date with our most recent progress, make sure you’re following us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We’re getting SO close friends, and we can’t wait to have you in!

Cheers!