Tennessee Brewery

OUR BREW SYSTEM

We strive to create craft beer using a greener brewing process. Tennessee Brew Works was the first brewery in North America to utilize the Meura Micro Mash Filter (001 is on our serial number) with the U.S.-made Aegir Brewing System to create all of our brews; fostering a brewing processes that enhances efficiency. 

The 30-hectoliter (25+ barrel) brew system is uniquely designed to offer a higher level of efficiency than is customary for a brewery of this size. In general, brewing is a resource intensive process, but our brew system uses less water, raw materials, and energy than a traditional lauter tun system.

Some fine facts about our system and process:
1) Using the Meura 2001 Micro mash filter minimizes our ecological footprint in multiple ways; including reducing our grain usage. We extract virtually 100% of the sugars from our malt as determined by the E.B.C. laboratory yield (fine grist). It is common for lauter tun brewhouses (utilized by >99% of the breweries in North America) to experience extract losses from 10-15%.
2) Lautering systems rely on the barley husk and thus often are limited to recipes with high barley percentages. Our mash filter opens up possibilities of brewing with a wide variety of grains such as wheat and rye in any amount; explaining how we are able to brew beers like our seasonal "Walk the Lime," which virtually uses 100% wheat grains.
3) Thanks to a total filtering and sparge time of <100 minutes, we are able to brew more beer in less time (again, compared to traditional lauter tun brewhouses). We can produce three to four batches of beer in a 10-12 hour time period; representing both energy and labor savings.
4) Our spent grains are 10% dryer which leads to a cleaner operation with essentially dry matter versus liquid matter. This allows ease of handling for both us and our partnering farmers, who repurpose our spent grains for animal feed.
5) We save between 25-50% in water usage during our filtration due to the recovery of more wort, and ease of cleaning the mash filter. 
6) The gravity of our wort after filtering and sparging is >16°P, allowing us to brew high gravity brews with 100% efficiency. We have an ideal set-up for brewing specialty beers.
7) Our sparging process is reduced and leads to less leaching of astringent tannins and other unwanted components.
8) Our process and equipment produce a wort that is of high quality or “brighter”. This brighter wort has 30-50% lower volumes of trub (proteins and particulates), which lessens our need for additional processes to remove these solids. Also, our brighter wort has lower hop consumption (5-15%) allowing more of our hops make it into the finished beer. Read more...