New Craft-Star brewhouse to be installed at California’s The Bruery

The Bruery in Orange County, Calif., specializes in experimental and barrel-aged beer, soon with a GEA brewhouse.

The global beer experts at GEA Brewery Systems just announced the sale of a Craft-Star artisanal brewhouse to The Bruery, in Orange County, Calif. The recipient is a boutique craft brewery specializing in experimental and barrel-aged beer. The company’s name is a fusion of “brewery” with the founding family’s name of “Rue.”

Already well on their way to becoming a significant player on the national craft beer scene, The Bruery needed a sharp increase in production capacity and found a two-vessel Craft-Star by GEA to be just the right fit. Unconventional maybe, but very highly regarded by their peers, The Bruery makes a very wide variety of exceptionally unique and popular beers. Their philosophy: Create beers with character and depth using the simplest and purest of means. The brewery does not filter or pasteurize its beers. Most of its bottled beers gain carbonation through bottle conditioning, allowing carbonation to naturally occur through a secondary bottle fermentation. The Bruery strives to use unconventional ingredients as well.

The GEA Craft-Star is a 30-barrel (bbl), automated brewhouse, built with the American craft brewer in mind. The pre-skidded design makes for a seamless install and batch sizes are flexible from 20 to 35 bbls. The Craft-Star comes in two configurations; a two-vessel system with a mash/lauter tun and a whirlpool/wort kettle, or the three-vessel system with a separate mash kettle, dedicated lauter tun and a whirlpool/wort kettle. With these two designs, the brewer can choose the one that best fits his or her needs.

Some other key features are: A build-in grist hydrator that facilitates efficient and clump free mashing-in; differential-pressure lautering to ensure a fast filtration process with high yields; and an external wort heater with a circulation loop for homogenous wort treatment and proper hot trub separation in the whirlpool/wort kettle.

The new Craft-Star brewhouse at drinktec, Munich, September 2013.

Also standard on the Craft-Star are automatic mash and sparge water tempering, a lauter wort sampling station and full CIP capability. Add the finishing touch of modern process visualization and process control via a detachable laptop work station and it completes the picture of a meticulously designed brew system skid. The Craft-Star allows for a performance of up to five brews within a 24 hour timeframe.

The Bruery will take delivery and install their new Craft-Star artisanal brewhouse in 2014.