Virtual tour of the brewery - The brew house
The brew house is aptly named. This is where the beer is produced. Or rather, this is where the foundations of the beer are laid, using high quality water, select Moravian malt and the finest Žatec hops – a special strain harvested relatively early in the season from the unique red soils of Žatec. The mixing of these ingredients results in something called hopped wort. Wort is the name given to an infusion of malt before it is fermented into beer.
The brewing process takes approximately 10 hours and includes three phases – mashing, straining and the boiling of the wort.
Mashing, which lasts about 5 hours, results in the transformation of non-fermentable malt starch into fermentable sugar. The principle is in mixing ground malt with water and heating always one third of the volume (the mash) to a precisely determined temperature. Mashing is repeated twice.
Straining, which takes 3.5 hours, follows in order to separate the wort from the malt residues that were not boiled. The resulting mash wort then enters the final phase known as wort boiling.
During the 90-minute wort boiling, the resulting mash wort is boiled with the cones of the finest Žatec hops. This creates the expected, pleasantly bitter taste that makes taking sip after sip so tempting. The end product of wort boiling is called hopped wort. For a better idea – the concentration of the extract in the hopped wort intended for the production of the lager is 12%. The beer then leaves the brew house to undergo the main fermentation process. Let’s take look at what happens at this stage.
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