For this assignment I decided to do it on a beer brewery, and I chose to go to Brooklyn Brewery located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This specific brewery has four ingredients which is malted barley, hops, yeast and water at times they might also add wheat.
Brooklyn brewery doesn’t use their own ingredients for their beer, by teaming up with Grow NYC’s Greenmarket they link up with local farms as a source of their grains. North County Farms in Watertown, NY is the biggest supplier supplying over 70% of the grain used in Brooklyn. All of the hops for their beers come from a farm outside of Syracuse, NY, owned by the very own Brooklyn Brewery’s technical director Mary Wiles, combined with their bavarian yeast and New York State water to complete the recipe. By using ingredients from local farm’s they reduce cost and help provide the freshest ingredients for their beer. North County Farms uses two granite stones to produce flours and other mixes from locally grown grains.The whole brewing process starts with what they call sanitization, cleaning all bacteria and any unwanted ingredients from the brew. After the sanitization comes the mash, during this process you’re extracting all the sugars, color and flavor you can from the grain, by heating water and adding the grain and stirring consistently you finally extract what you need. Going along the process the boil comes next, during this process you’re bringing your wort to a low, rolling boil and keeping it there for a period of time while adding ingredients like hops and spices. After this comes fermentation, this is when the beer actually becomes alcoholic.
In the tasting room there is an employee at each tasting with fifteen customers and you get to taste four different beers. Before the tasting starts the employee took us to the back and showed us how their beer is made taking us on a journey through their brewery passing by thousand gallon vats of beer and meeting many cheery faced employees. Along with that you get a step by step breakdown of how the beer is made, taking you from vat to vat explaining what happens in each one. After the trip through the brewery you get to sit in their lounge area tasting different beers or if that’s not your mood you can hit the store and purchase memorabilia or even your very own beer.
