Prism Brewing Company

Prism Beer

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PRISM BREWING COMPANY © 2010

Creating a whole new spectrum of beer

ABOUT OUR BREWERY

BREWING PROCESS

Brewing beer is as simple as creating some sugar water and letting yeast eat it. Ok, if it were that easy everyone would be doing it. But it is amazing what you can do with just four basic ingredients;

water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. Of course, we like to throw in a few other items for good measure too. The process begins with mixing malted barley with hot water to extract sugars to create wort. This sugar water is then heated up to a rolling boil when we begin adding hops. Hops inpact beer differently based on when you add them. They add bitterness, flavor, and aroma to beer (hense 'triple hopped'). Once cooled, we add yeast which eats the sugars and creates CO2 and alcohol. After fermentation and consitioning it's time to bottle or keg for your enjoyment!

After months of brewing at the General Lafayette Inn & Brewery, we've begun installation of a brewery which is our very own. Our 20 Barrel (BBL) brewhouse comes from the Virginia Brewing Company. Sadly, they never even had a chance to brew on it before going out of business. Both the Mash/lauter tun and brew kettle/whirlpool of the DME brewhouse are steam jacketed for heating which provides us with the ability to do step infusions for particular styles of beer. Going from 5 gallons at home, to 210 gallons (7 BBL) at the General Lafayette, to 620 gallons gives use room to make plenty of beer to keep up with demand.We try to save energy where we can by heatin up our mash/sparge water on demand with a tube and shell steam heat exchanger instead of circulating the water in the tank until it is hot enough and then mixing it with cold water to achieve our desired temperature. We also try to conserve energy by using another heat exchanger to cool our city water prior to sending it to the wort chiller. Of course, we reuse this water for the next batch of beer.We are starting with just three fermenters which limits us to brewing just 1.5 times a week, but such a large batch size still allows us to achieve 1500 BBL's per year at capacity. We expect to add more fermentation and brite tanks well before reaching this limit.