The process of brewing beer is not simple, and when unique flavors are brought in, the process is even more complex.
Destihl has perfected its award-winning beer flavors since opening its doors in Normal in 2007, with an expansion to its current location in 2017.
CEO and founder of Destihl Matt Potts has been brewing beer for about 30 years. His first beer was a five-gallon batch made in a homebrew kit.
Now, Destihl's brewhouse has a capacity of 2,046 gallons, or 66 brewer's barrels [bbl], per batch, and it has tanks that can hold four batches for its own beer brand and partner brands.
Malts
The brewing operation starts with a malt — a processed grain, primarily barley, used specifically for brewing.
The majority of the color in a beer comes from the type of malt used.
“But it's more than just the color,” Potts said. “You'll also get flavors of chocolate, coffee flavors, etc., depending on how much you use [of each].”
Destihl has lots of specialty malts for their unique craft beers and partner brands — everything from a lighter Pilsen malt, to caramel malt to a roasted barley.
“If you think of an analogy,” Potts said, “it would be like what grape is to wine, barley is to beer, because that is ultimately our sugar source.”
Potts said in his opinion, brewing is more complicated than wine making.
“Because we're not just taking a grape, squishing the juice out of it, introducing a yeast and fermenting it. We actually have to convert the starches in barley into fermentable sugars [first],” Potts said.
There is nearly an endless amount of combinations for what can be done with barley alone, not to mention other grains like wheat, rye and oats.
“We're not afraid to push the limits of beer flavor [and] aroma,” Potts said.
The mill room
When a malt is picked out, it’s brought through the mill room.
Prepared malted grain is pulled from silos into the mill room at 120 pounds per minute. There, it goes through mill rollers and is turned into grist — a coarsely ground malt.
“[The mill] actually cracks the barley. So it doesn't turn it into flour, it just barely cracks it. Sometimes you can't even tell if it's cracked, but if you touch it, it'll fall apart. So you don't want to pulverize it or turn it into flour because that'll cause issues in the brew house,” Potts said.
Barely is the choice-grain for brewers because after the grain is malted and milled, the husk acts as a filter bed in the mash that allows water to go through and pick up all the sugars from the grains while clarifying the wort.
Mash
The grist that was previously made in the mill room gets mixed with hot water into a mash tun.
The mash tun can hold up to 6,000 pounds of grist, and when mixed with water it is known as a mash. Within a short amount of time, the starches from the malted and milled grain convert into fermentable sugar. Once that process is completed and the mash is tested, a false-bottom separates wort, essentially sugar water, from the grain.
The wort gets pumped over to a brew kettle and then gets sterilized by being brought to a boil before yeast is added. This is where the hops are added as well; the more hops added, the more bitter the beer will be.
“All those nice hop aromas are going to go out with the steam,” Potts said. “So there's other hops you add later on the boil.”
“Flavor hops” are added with only a few minutes left in a boil, with aroma hops added in the last couple minutes, or even later in the process after the heat is turned off.
“So, our Deadhead IPA series, those will have a lot of hops in them, especially the hazy IPAs. They're not as bitter [as a classic west-coast style IPA], so we don't add as many bittering hops,” Potts said.
After the boil is done, the hot wort gets sent over to a whirlpool to form a trub pile that separates out hops that were added in the kettle or whirlpool, as well as coagulated proteins and any barley husks that made it through.
The final product is cooled and sent to the fermenter.
Fermentation
The purpose of fermentation is to create alcohol in the beer.
Yeast is added to the wort that was produced in the mash tun and it consumes the sugars, turning them into alcohol and CO2.
Destihl uses several sizes of fermenters for the different volumes of beer it has to produce, the tanks are measured in how many barrels of liquid they can hold.
The tanks get as large as 256 barrels, and as small as 10 barrels for pilot batches and beer hall exclusives.
Destihl produces over 32,000-35,000 bbls per year, and just finished expanding fermentation capacity earlier this year to over 75,000 bbls per year.
Distribution
Destihl-brand beers are available in over 40 U.S. states and some countries outside of the U.S., including Sweden.
Beyond Destihl’s own brand of beer, a large part of its business is contract work for other beer brands.
When a batch is ready to package, the beer is either put into kegs or cans at a canning speed of 200 cans per minute, and then palletized for distribution.
