Milling: Here at Shongweni Brewery we crush all of our own malt, now called the grist, to ensure that we get the right consistency for our beer.

Mashing: The grist then gets intimate with hot liquor (water used for brewing) in the mash tun, a large cylindrical vessel, for up to two hours. Most of our beers use either pale or lager malt as the main component of the grist, though our wheat beers use a high proportion of unmalted wheat. We use pale or lager malts as they have the highest levels of starch and enzymes that will convert the starch in the grist into fermentable sugars. Depending on the beer we might add speciality malt to the mash to provide a more complex flavour or colour the beer. During the mash the hot liquor extracts the fermentable sugars from the grist leaving a mass of grain husks that make ideal food for the local pigs.

The sweet, malty, run off from the mash tun is called wort and to ensure that we have extracted all of the fermentable sugars we then spray more hot liquor through revolving sparge arms above the grist. The wort is then pumped to the Copper and the boiling begins.

The Copper: The copper is a huge kettle where we boil the wort, this not only sterilises it but also caramelises some of the sugars in the liquid and starts to create and define the final flavour of our beers. The other important thing that happens in the copper is the addition of the hops. Here at Shongweni Brewery we use natural hops and we add these at the start and toward the end of the boil to provide both bitterness and aroma to the beer.

Hops are wonderful; they provide the fruity, bitter counterbalance to the sweet biscuityness of the malty wort. They do this by yielding resins and oils present in the cones. The resins produce the bitterness and have preservative qualities while the hop oils provide flavour and aroma. The variety of hops from around the world is fascinating and we use hops from as far afield as the USA, Europe, and the UK while making our beers to ensure that we get the right balance in the beer. Part of the art of brewing is the choice and combination of hops to produce the perfect beer.

If we are brewing a fruit beer then we will usually add our whole fruit into the copper towards the end of the boil to extract the flavours and sugars from the fruit. Occassionaly we might even put the fruit into the fermentation vessel.

Yeast and Fermentation: After the boil the hopped wort is cooled and pumped to one of our fermenting vessels. Once we are happy with the temperature in the fermenter we ‘pitch’ our yeast into the wort and then we wait while the yeast gets on with its business of multiplying and producing alcohol and carbon dioxide. We use different strains of yeast for different beers. It is believed that the majority of the thousands of flavour components found in beer are produced by the yeast during fermentation, so our choice of yeast is critical to the flavour of the beer.

The primary fermentation is usually completed within three to five days depending on the strength of the beer. Once the primary fermentation is complete we can then begin the bottling process. All of our beers retain yeast in the bottle so that we can achieve the secondary fermentation in the bottle that makes our beers so tasty. Most of our beers are then stored in our conditioning rooms for at least a month though some of the stronger beers may stay for six weeks before we release them for drinking. 

The beauty of bottle-conditioned beer is that it continues to improve if kept and will develop into an even more complex and rewarding beer over time. Enjoy!