Somehow, my husband Tim and I managed to score a private tour of Victory with one of the brewers last night. Hot damn!

We were led around by the quality control/yeast guy, whose name also happens to be Tim. But I’ll go ahead and refer to him as Dr. Tim, as he has a PhD in Biochemistry (smart guy!).

The great part about getting a private tour was that he didn’t have to dumb anything down for us, since he knew that we were already experienced in brewing. He went into more depth than he normally would on a tour for the public. The other great part of the tour was that he immediately offered us a beer before we started. Score.

First, he showed us the most intense grain mill I’ve ever seen. It actually mills the grains wet, at near mash temperatures. The result is a better grind and less dust. The thing costs almost as much as the house we just bought.

Grain mill

Next, we moved onto the brew room. They’ve got it set up so they can do up to four brews at once in a day, staggered. In this room, they also have their 200-barrel fermenters… Massive! They brew in 50-barrel batches, so it takes four brews to fill one of these suckers up.

Front: 50-barrel brewing vessels, back: 200-barrel fermenters

View of 200-barrel fermenters from the bottom up

One sweet thing about Victory’s set-up is that they actually have a decoction mash vessel, which is something that most breweries don’t even bother attempting.

Tim (front) with Victory brewer Dr. Tim (back) checking out the decoction mash vessel

They also have a hop-back. Turns out they never dry-hop their beers. The dudes in charge (Ron and Bill) don’t like the astringency you can get from dry-hopping. In addition, it’s a heck of a lot easier using a hop-back. I can say from my own experience that dry-hopping is a major pain in the butt.

Hop-back

Speaking of hops, they have a giant, walk-in hop freezer. Let me tell you, it smelled amazing in there. Victory exclusively uses whole hops in their beers.

Piles and piles of whole hops in the hop freezer

Right next to the hop freezer is their control room. All the brewing at Victory is automated, which the brewers control using brewing software.

Brewing controls

Next, we moved on to see even more fermenters. We got to see two different types of 50-barrel fermenters. Their newer fermenters have a nice, steep cone at the bottom. After a beer has finished fermenting, the yeast settles into the cone, which the brewer can then let down through the bottom to harvest the yeast for more brews. (Side note, Victory will typically reuse an ale yeast about 20 times, and a lager yeast about 10.)

Newer 50-barrel conical fermenters

The other, older fermenters pictured below do not have as steep of a cone at the bottom. Because of the shallow cone, if yeast is collected through the bottom, you end up with too much beer mixed in with the yeast. Therefore, in this type of fermenter, yeast is actually harvested from the krausen through the windows at the top of the fermenters. This can cause a sanitation nightmare, which is certainly not something you want to deal with when you’re talking about batch sizes this large.

When Dr. Tim was first hired at Victory, it was his job to devise a method of harvesting yeast from the bottom of these older fermenters, which he succeeded in doing. (Like I said, smart guy.)

Older 50-barrel conical fermenters

Speaking of yeast, Victory has a separate vessel used exclusively for propagating yeast. They’ll typically pitch 150 lbs of yeast into a 50-barrel batch of beer. I can’t even imagine pitching that much yeast!

Yeast propagation vessel

They also have a lab, where they do all sorts of neat mad-scientist type things. Here, they can take hydrometer readings, check out the yeast cells under a microscope, autoclave stuff…

The lab

So, that’s it as far as the brewing process goes. Dr. Tim also showed us the packaging line, which is really neat to see if you’re into mechanical stuff. But since that’s a little out of the scope of my blog, I’m gonna skip talking about that. It was pretty amazing to see. Plus, he gave us a six-pack of “reject” Moonglows (they were ever-so-slightly under-filled).

After the tour, we hung out in one of the fermentation rooms, drinking Moonglow directly from the fermenter. Then we went back over by the bar, where he gave us more free beer. Seriously generous guy.

This tour was definitely an incredible learning experience for us. We were able to ask the type of questions that we could never get answered on other tours. We’ll be able to take all this valuable information with us for our future brewery-owning endeavors!

You know, with every professional brewer that we meet, I realize more and more how badly I want that lifestyle. Working in a brewery has got to be the coolest job on the planet. For now, I’m stuck as an engineer in my boring little cube. But someday, I’ll be like Dr. Tim, you wait and see!