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Home Photo Galleries Equipment Galleries Mark Brooks • Lærdal, Norway

My name is Mark Brooks and I live in Norway with my wife, Trine, and our daughter. My homebrew dream was to have an all-food-grade, stainless-steel brewery with that magic 1,000-liter (264-gallon) capacity. I started calling different companies that sell brewery stuff,  but soon realized that this would take an investment much larger than any hobby brewer could even dream of. So I started roaming dumps, dairy plants and other factories in the food-production business to scrounge for used or outdated materials. In this way, my stock of stainless grew and grew. When I told people that I was building a small countryside brewery, they all got interested. I don’t know how much beer I promised to  guys in the food industry all over Norway. I do know that I am sending out beer steadily. Getting all my valuables here also took a lot of beer-bribing in the trucking industry, but as long it’s about beer they’re all helpful.

In the beginning, I hired a welder to weld the parts I had prepared. After 20 hours I could already hear my wallet screaming, so I ended up buying his TIG and rod welder and had him instruct me in the mysteries of welding. Again, this was partially paid in future brew. There were lots of obstructions and failures encountered on the way, but as you can see, I ended up with a 99.9% stainless- steel brew house. (The lid on the boil kettle is aluminum and a stainless cone is under construction.) Although it’s not completely finished, it works very well with high brewhouse yields and the possibility to brew any beer one could imagine.

Brewery
My steam-fired, three-kettle setup lets me prepare any adjuncts I wish to add to the mash or do a decoction brew with any desired percentage of the mash. I have clean-in-place (CIP) units in all the vessels, which gives me vessels and transfer lines as clean as any brewer could wish for. The only parts of the brewery originally intended for beer — as opposed to salvaged dairy equipment — are the two 1,000-liter high-pressure tanks. I bought these from the company that developed the “bag in tank” concept. Although expensive, I purchased them with a 45% discount and the promise of 200 liters (53 gallons) of beer to be delivered to the company’s Christmas party. They have already pre-tested the product and were so pleased that they sent me 40 pieces of their 1,000-liter Mylar liner bags for my tanks. They work great as the beer is always contained in a sterile environment and it allows me to transfer beer with air pressure. The mash vessel is an 800-liter (211 gallon) farmer’s milk cooler in which I have installed a slotted false bottom, a mash stirrer and a circulation pump for gentle recirculation of the wort. The pump is also used for transferring the wort to the boil kettle.

Kettle
The kettle is another milk cooler. At 1,000 liters, it’s slightly bigger than the mash vessel. The kettle has foam insulation and a cooling jacket. Heating is done by gas as it gives the option of caramelizing some of the wort for taste and coloring adjustments. A pump transports the wort to the plate heat exchanger; from there, it goes into the fermentation tank. Aeration is done by submerging a stainless aeration stone in the fermentation tank. High-pressure sterile oxygen is used for this task.

Fermentation Tank
My 1,000-liter fermentation tank is also a dairy tank. It is a closed vacuum tank fitted with a vacuum pump. This serves me well as a way of getting CO2 from the fermenter out of the room, leaving no hazardous gas in the brewery. Keep in mind that 1,000 liters of fermenting wort produces approximately 4 kg (8.8 lbs.) of pure CO2, only 0.3 kg (0.7 lbs) of which remains in the beer. For more information, see www.Brooks.no.

Mark in his Brewery


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