As far as the scratch system goes, I’ve only used it once, for the porter. For me, it was a lot of fun because it was a step back into the days of brewing by hand. This is obviously how I was first trained, and how i brewed everyday for years.
When I moved to Troegs, I moved into a much more automated world. Automated brewing, or near-automated brewing is definitely great, and that is one of the reasons i wanted to work for a company like Troegs. However, when I was brewing the porter it was very nice to scale things back and control things as a brewer.
Although there is a PC on the system, we were running nearly the entire brew “by hand”. Setting our lauter speeds, pump frequencies, sparge temps, steam jackets etc., by literally opening and closing valves manually…very basic, and very traditional. The return to manual brewing, on a state of the art brewhouse, coupled with a recipe that could not be more appropriate for hershey, pa, made for a really enjoyable day at work and a great brewing session.
written by Bruce Tanner
Below is a link to the making of the Cocoa Porter-Scratch #54 with Bruce hard at work.
