The Happy Goblin Brewery uses a very small custom built brewing system built in 2006 by Colin Larter, the brewer, with the help from a number of friends (hoping to get some free beer out of the deal).
No part of the brewery is automated or mechanised. The malt is ground by hand, and all fluid transfer is achieved by gravity, using pulleys to raise vessels and siphoning fluids from one vessel to another. This means the Happy Goblin is truly a hand-made beer.
The Mill - 100% Goblin powered. For grinding malt. The grain is just cracked, rather than ground completely. The husks need to be intact. After grinding the malt is called the grist. This is added to the mash tun.
Mash Tun - A double walled 60L vessel hand-crafted by the Happy Goblin, with thick polystyrene insulation. There is a strainer made from perforated copper pipers, connected to a valve in the base. The grist is mixed with hot water and left to soak for one to two hours, as the starch in the malt is converted to sugar by various malt enzymes. The water (with the dissolved sugars) is strained off and more hot water added to rinse as much of the sugars out as possible, this water is called sweet wort (pr. wert). The mash is raised on a pulley system, allowing the wort to drain down into the kettle.
Kettle - 98L stainless steel kettle, heated by a 4-ring propane burner. The sweet wort is brought to the boil, and hops are added. Hops are the flowers of the hop plant, and contain bitter compounds that are extracted into the wort by boiling. After an hour or more of boiling the heating stops and the wort is allowed to settle, all the hops sink to the bottom, along with much of the protein from the malt, which has reacted with compounds from the hops to form an insoluble material known as trub. The clear hopped wort is the run off through the heat exchanger.
Heat Exchanger - 9m of double copper pipe. The wort flows through the inside pipe and is cooled by water flowing through the outside pipe. The cooled wort is pitched with yeast as soon as possible and the hot water is used for cleaning.
Fermenter - The fermenters are 54L glass demijohns normally used for wine making. They live on trolleys so they can be moved between the brewhouse and the cool rooms, and can be raised using the same pulley system as used for the mash. The beer is raised to allow syphoning into secondary fermenters or kegs. The fermentation process starts with the yeast being added to the chilled wort. The primary fermentation lasts one to two weeks after which the beer is transferred to a secondary fermenter where it matures for three to six weeks.
Packaging - Once the beer is mature it is packaged into 18L kegs or 330mL bottles.