Diary of a Brewer: St Andrews Brewing Company

So after returning to St. Andrews from Fraserburgh I've wasted no time continuing my affinity with breweries. On this occasion I volunteered with Bob Phaff, the owner and founder of the St Andrews Brewing Company. Bob founded this microbrewery in January of this year and has seen great success thus far, receiving a warm welcome from more than 50 local restaurants and farm shops. In May I spent a few days helping Bob at his brewery and returned from Fraserburgh just in time to be of assistance again yesterday.

Bob has been active in the beer industry for quite a while, working at breweries and even writing a book about the microbrewery scene in Idaho where he lived for a few years. when he first came to St. Andrews he asked if he could try the local beer and was shocked to find out that there wasn't one. Obviously a gap in the market that needed to be filled, and who better suited than a microbrewery enthusiast to fill it. So in January of 2012 Bob saw the arrival of his brewing kit, comprising of a 10 hectolitre (hl) hot liquor tank, a ~3 hl mash tun and a ~7 hl copper and he has been producing great beers ever since.


Bob gave me a lift from St. Andrews to Glenrothes yesterday morning at 7:00am to start a day of bottling and labelling. Bob runs a one-man operation and so is extremely busy and always open to having some extra hands volunteering. Our first task was to put labels on a batch of Nuek Ale that had been maturing for the past few weeks and was now ready to be labelled and boxed up for sale. This involved stamping the best before date as required by law on the labels before applying them to the bottles. Then we applied the labels by hand to all 150 bottles. This proved to be a labour intensive and time consuming process. We also ended up putting labels on about 120 bottles of Fife Gold and 240 bottles of Oatmeal Stout, by the end of which I wished I never had to see another bottle label for the rest of my life.

In between the labelling of the three different types of beer we bottled a batch of 70/- that had been fermenting for the past 7 days or so. The volume of the fermenting vessel was about 400 litres, so accounting for waste and sediment we were aiming to bottle about 750 beers. The first step was to gather several rows of clean bottles straight from the pallet they arrived on. We lined these bottles up on the bench next to the fermenter and using a funnel filled each one with a small amount of sugar to facilitate fermentation in the bottle to produce carbonation. This step must be performed because the fermenting vessel that Bob owns lacks the ability to withstand pressures up to  3 bar necessary for CO2 to be present in the beer prior to bottling.

Two by two, and by hand, the bottles are then fitted onto the arms you can see protruding from the mechanism we use to fill the bottles. This machine automatically siphons beer from the tank into the bottles filling them to exactly 500ml; once filled we simply have to unclip them and line them up to be capped. This capping process was done in about 50 bottle batches repeated until we had bottled nearly 700 beers. These beers were then moved onto pallets for them to age. Because of the set-up that Bob has (mostly his limited storage capacity) the bottles sit unlabelled until they are ready to sell. This is because every time that Bob boils a batch of beer in the copper the entire room steams up and this would strip the labels off of the beer bottles.

After cleaning all of the supplies that we used to bottle including the brew tank that we emptied we then moved all of the labelled bottles to the small storage area, gave the floor a quick mop and prepared the ingredients for the next days brew. Bob was going to be brewing a batch of 80/- for the first time and wanted to make sure that all his supplies were ready to go for a 7:00 start the next morning.

I'll be working several days with Bob over the next few weeks (when I find free time amidst graduation and career searching). I've thoroughly enjoyed my time working him thus far and am looking forward to learning much more from the one man team that is the St Andrews Brewing Company.