First we start with barley and wheat which is malted by germination, drying and then kilning until it’s reached the required colour specification.

Milling crushes the malted grain to expose the starchy endosperm so that the sugars can be extracted in the mash.

Mashing is the process of combining a mix of malts with hot water and then mixing. Mashing allows the enzymes in the malt to break down the starch in the grain into sugars to create a sweet liquid called wort.

Lautering is the process of separating the mash into the clear wort and spent grain. It involves sparging with additional hot water to recover as much of the sugars as possible.

After lautering we are left with wort and spent grain. Our beer wort continues on its process of becoming beer and our spent grain is sent to a farm as animal feed, reducing our waste and our overall environmental impact of our brewing.

After mashing, the wort is boiled for a number of reasons, including sterilisation of the wort, extracting hop bitterness and aroma compounds, denaturing the mash enzymes, precipitating proteins and concentrating the wort sugars to specification. The boil on typically lasts 60 minutes with a varying hop addition schedule depending on the beer.

At the end of the boil, solid particles in the hopped wort are separated out in a vessel called a whirlpool. This works by swirling the wort and the centripetal force will push denser solids into a cone at the centre of the bottom of the tank, which remains when the cleared wort is drawn off.

After the whirlpool, the wort must be brought down to yeast pitching temperature of between 12-20OC and oxygenated before yeast is added.

Once yeast is added to the prepared wort it begins to ferment. Yeast metabolises sugars from the malt and creates alcohol, carbon dioxide and flavour compounds as by products, and this is how we get beer! Here at CBCO we have 37 fermentation tanks containing between 5,000L and 20,000L each.

After fermentation, the unfinished beer is cooled down to encourage the yeast the settle out and it then reused for the next brew or discarded. For our dry hopped beers, additional hops are added to the clear beer and soaked to extract the aroma compounds. Finally with the help of a centrifuge, all solids are removed and the beer is carbonated in preparation for packaging.

Here at our Port Melbourne Brewery, we use the best beer technology available including a Krones canning line, capable of canning approximately 15,000 cans per hour.