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The past fortnight has been a huge couple of weeks here at Pirate Life! It all kicked off last Thursday when a convoy of container trucks arrived loaded with four shiny new tanks all the way from China. The first upgrade in the history of Pirate Life consists of three 100 hL fermentation vessels and one 100 hL bright beer tank.
The tanks are custom made for Pirate Life to make dry hopping as easy as possible and when fully operational will increase our capacity by a huge 140% meaning there will be more beer available in more places Australia wide just in time for Christmas.
It has been said that nothing worth doing is ever easy and getting the tanks into the brewery from our yard proved to be no exception. With the beams that hold up our roof too low for the tanks to be wheeled in sideways and erected the only way that we could get the suckers in was craning them through the roof!
So it was early last Friday morning that the crane arrived to lift our new tanks into a temporarily roofless brewery. The installation was much easier than anticipated with the weather proving perfect for our early morning lift and pretty soon our four new shiny toys were upright, in position and ready to have temperature probes and glycol system installed so that we could get on with the most important part of all: brewing into them.
That process has begun but while we were waiting we took advantage of the added capacity and in our first night shift for the summer brewed the first batch of a new beer to be released later this year. New hops, a new style and a new recipe all rolled into one brew; we are excited to taste the results. A day later the first brew of Pale Ale was transferred into a new tank and as this is typed our first ever 10,000 L batch of Pale Ale is bubbling away happy in its shiny new home.
Watch a video of the upgrade in action below:
Have a wicked weekend.
Cheers, PLB Crew
