a brewer at work at the hall brewery

The Brewing Process

Quality, consistency and innovation are key to creating amazing and beautifully balanced beer.

To hear from the team on how our beer is made, book yourself onto the Thornbridge Experience

Find out more and Book Now

The Brewing Process

All the different processes to brew beer

Each Process in detail

  • Graphic of the malt silo

    Malting is the process of steeping, germinating and drying grain to convert it into malt

  • graphic depicting the milling stage of brewing

    Milling is the physical crushing of malt kernels into smaller particles in preparation for mashing and lautering. The various milling processes need to be manipulated carefully to find a balance between a grind that is too fine and one that is too coarse.

  • Image of Mashing apparatus

    Mashing is the term given to the start of the brewing process, where crushed grains are mixed with water to form a porridge-like mixture called the “mash.” It is in the mash that malt and other cereal starches are transformed into sugars and proteins and other materials are made soluble, creating the sweet fermentable liquid called the wort.

  • The lautering vessel

    Lautering is a method of separating sweet wort from spent grain. Historically, mashing and lautering often took place in a single vessel but brewers soon realized that optimizing separate vessels for each part of the process of wort generation and recovery would lead to improved beer quality.

  • the boiling tank

    Boiling wort is one of the most crucial and complex aspects of the brewing process and Whirlpool is the method of separating hop fragments and other solid particles from hot wort.

  • Hopnik vessel

    In the hopnik the boiling wort pass through a bed of whole leaf hops without losing any of the fabulous aromas

  • image depicting where the beer is cooled

    Fermentation vessels are fitted with hollow jackets that chill parts of the interior surface of the vessel on demand. This allows brewers to set a maximum temperature during active fermentation and then easily chill the beer for further processing

  • Fermentation vessel

    Fermentation is the process by which yeast converts the glucose in the wort to alcohol and carbon dioxide - giving the beer both its alcohol content and its carbonation. To begin the fermentation process, the cooled wort is transferred into a fermentation vessel to which the yeast has already been added. The fermentation time and temperature varies on the style of beer

  • Conditioning vessel

    Conditioning is the achievement, post-fermentation, of a particular beer’s correct character of maturation and carbonation,

  • Centrifuge vessel

    Seperating the finished beer from the other particles including yeast, trub, and hop residue

  • packaging imaged

    Depending on what has been brewed after all stages, beers are packaged into either Cask, Kegs, Cans or Bottles
The brewing process in the small hall brewery

The Hall Brewery

The original hall bewery kit is now behind the taproom and is used to brew smaller runs and our speciality cask beer range

Find out more and Book now

The Brewing Process

  1. Ever wondered what goes in to making the prefect pint? We are taking you behind the scenes and breaking down every stage of the brewing process.

    Voiceovers by Technical Brewer, Ben Wood.

  2. 1

    Milling

    Milling is the first stop on our journey from grain to glass. Simpsons Malt deliver 25 tonnes of malted barley into our silos each week, alongside specialty malts that add colour and flavour. Our base malt is Maris Otter, an English-only heritage barley variety that makes up the vast majority of all the grain we use.

    Brewers load 25kg sacks into a hopper, sending the malt into the mill for grinding. This process cracks open the grains to expose their starchy interior — starch we then convert into sugar so yeast can use it to create alcohol. The crushed malt, now called grist, is stored in the grist case until the brew house is ready to start brewing.

  3. 2

    Mashing

    This is where brewing really gets going 🍻

    Mashing is all about converting starch into sugar. We add chloride and sulfate to our naturally soft water to achieve the right pH — the brew house computer controls both the liquor and the mash itself, hitting a specific ratio of liquor to grist and the correct temperature.

    This allows the starch in the grain to break down into sugars that dissolve in the water to form wort. We cool a sample and check the pH sits between 5.3 and 5.5 — just right. After 45 minutes, a second sample checks the conversion from starch to sugar is complete: a drop of iodine will turn deep blue-black if starch remains, so no colour change confirms the mash is done. Finally, the mash is heated to 76°C to deactivate the enzymes, then transferred to the lauter tun for the next stage.

  4. 3

    Lautering

    Lautering, the process of separating the liquid wort from the spent grains after mashing.

    Lautering, or wort separation, is the third step in the process. The lauter tun separates the sugary liquid — wort — from the solid spent grains, which we don't want carried over into the boiling kettle.

    The mash is transferred into the lauter tun and gently fed through the bottom to avoid splashing. Rakes turn to mix the mash before stopping to allow recirculation — around 10 minutes at a slow speed, establishing a filter bed of grain before runoff into the wort kettle begins. The whole process takes about 2 hours, producing around 6,500 litres of wort ready to boil. The spent grains are removed and loaded into a trailer, heading off to a local farm to feed cattle — nothing goes to waste.