In a four part series about Dublin craft beer we visited Hope Brewing Company. They are a craft beer brewery creating delicious American style craft beers. Throughout our visit we learned about how they create their brews, the sustainability of their business, and loads more behind the scenes information including how they can and package their beers.
Read on to find out more about Hope Brewing Company and check out our video series for more behind the scenes insights into the craft beer brewing process.
If you enjoyed our Hope Brewing Co. series check out our other Irish and Northern Irish producer videos such as our Belfast Cookery School series.
Hope Brewery are lucky in that they have a sister brewery who support them sharing knowledge and information. Their sister brewery is a Belgian brewery whose name is pronounced ‘hoop’ but spelled hope so they have linked names.
Another reason for their faithful name is the investment of owner Wim, who put his pension fund into starting the brewery and really hoped it would work out. After brewing over 1 million litres of beer that hope has paid off.
The process of brewing beer creates a lot of waste product as the grains and wheat are removed after being fermented. This can be a large food waste issue for breweries trying to limit their environmental impact.
Hope brewery have partnered with a local farmer who picks up their waste grains and takes it back to his farm. There it is used to feed his cattle and other animals. These animals will benefit from nutritional food and studies show that animals fed on leftover brewing grains produce less methane. This means less greenhouse gasses being released into the atmosphere and less food waste coming from the brewery.
When Hope Brewery started out they wanted to make sure they were making an amazing quality beer. They started with state of the art equipment from Germany, the company that built their brewery have been creating breweries since the 18th century. They also hired a staff of highly trained and passionate brewers and chose the highest quality ingredients possible.
The brewing process at Hope starts with milling barley, which is in most of the beers they produce. The barley they use is grown in Ireland and is combined with different malts depending on the flavour profile of the beer being produced.
The milled grains get transported to the mash tun/kettle where it is placed in hot water. This process of making the mash of a beer takes between one and two hours and makes the starches of a beer into sugars.
The mash is then pumped into the lauter tun where it is strained to remove the mash from the liquid. Then the liquid is pumped back into the kettle where it is boiled with added hops for around an hour to an hour and a half. The hops are added at different stages of the boil to dictate the flavour given by the hops. Sometimes the hops are added at a later part of the fermentation process to give a different flavour profile all together.
Following the boil the liquid ‘wort’ (unfermented beer) is pumped into the whirlpool. The movement of the liquid flowing through the whirlpool pushes any sediment to the middle allowing for a clearer liquid to drain out.
The wort is then pumped through a heat exchanger, cooled to 20 degrees so that the yeast can work and placed in a fermentation tank with yeast to allow it to ferment into beer. During fermentation excess yeast and hops are removed from the bottom of the tank.
The fermented beer is then transferred into a final tank where it is carbonated and made ready to be bottled or canned.
The Beers at Hope Brewery arrive at the brewery as plain empty cans and are purged with Co2 before being filled with beer. The cans continue along a conveyor and are sealed with lids. Further along the line the tops are washed and they continue along to be labelled.
Before the labels are placed in the conveyor system they are stamped with their batch number and best before date. This helps with quality control and to ensure customers know when their beer is still good to drink.
They are then boxed and palatized so they can be sent out to retailers.
Hope Brewing Company are bringing interesting craft beers to Dublin and to retailers across Ireland. If you are in Dublin and looking for a great idea for a day out why not visit their brewery and learn more about their beers on a brewery tour. During our visit we learned so much about the various steps involved in making a great craft beer from choosing the ingredients to variable boil times.
We aim to highlight the most amazing food and drink throughout Ireland and Northern Ireland and Hope Brewing Co. are only one of the many amazing producers there are on offer. Check out our videos for more great content on food and drink specialists across the country.
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