True Beer by Timothy Sprinkle

Author:Timothy Sprinkle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2015-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

And then there’s Josh Van Riper’s Odyssey Beerwerks in suburban Arvada, Colorado.

Built into a double-wide space in an industrial park about fifteen miles northwest of Denver, roughly half of Odyssey’s space is set aside for the taproom—complete with a hardwood bar and a few dozen tables opposite near floor-to-ceiling windows—while the rest is taken up by the brewhouse itself. And it’s big, just over four thousand square feet with soaring thirty-foot ceilings; plenty of room, as Van Riper later tells me, for three to four times as many fermenters and other pieces of hardware that he already has. As it stands, Odyssey’s setup includes a fifteen-barrel brewhouse, four fifteen-barrel fermenters, and two thirty-barrel fermenters, meaning it’s capable of fermenting 120 barrels at any one time. He can also can his beers on-site.

Aside from all the gleaming stainless steel, however, the thing that stands out most about Odyssey’s brewhouse is how organized it is. In addition to the lineup of brew kettles and fermenters, which are standard issue at every brewery, Van Riper and co-owner Chris Hill created a very “flow centric” brewing operation, with a grain storage vessel, hot and cold water lines, drainage pipes, and other process aides laid out in a very clean, logical way. Even as an outsider, it’s very easy to look at the system and see how everything comes together, how it gets from point A to point B and where it all ends up. Less noticeable are the wiring and control systems, also all developed by the owners, which enable the staff to remotely manage the fermenters and other vessels throughout the brewing process.

“So we did all of the glycol ourselves in here,” Van Riper tells me as we tour the brewhouse, him pointing out all the components he either designed or built himself before the brewery opened in 2013, “and pretty much everything that’s back behind here, which is hot and cold water and all that.” The lines themselves run far overhead, snaking between the various pieces of brewing equipment and connecting to each of the vessels a good fifteen feet above the ground.

Van Riper, a twenty-year mechanical engineering professional with a background in systems engineering and electrical systems, also built a keg washer and modified an automated canning line to work for the brewery’s packaging operation. (Odyssey was canning about forty-five cases per hour when I visited and was selling its beer across Colorado, with national expansion already in its sights.) It started out as a two-head manual system, he says, but it has evolved over time to include more automated features as he has time to work on it. “I’m working on the fill heads now, and I’ve got this new style fill head that I’ve put in there. As a matter of fact, tomorrow I’m canning and I’m going to add in a CO2 foam injection just to see how that does with the foam on top.”

He also designed a large steel grain storage bin—something he referred to as “a

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