Our Brewhouse

Our Brewing Process

Grain, hops, yeast, water. Those are the basics, but you can combine them in so many different ways to create distinctive beers. You need to start with good ingredients to create good beer, so we source the best malts, hops, and yeast. Then we add fresh, local ingredients such as honey from The Bee Shed in Oronoco . It depends on the season and our mood. Brewing our beer in small batches on site keeps the beer fresh and local.

What happens to all those spent grains? Grand Rounds sources our beef from local cattle farmers, Hart Farms. After each brewing session, the fine folks at Hart Farms pick up the spent grains and feed them to their cattle. Those lucky cows become fat, happy, and delicious.

Brewhouse

When you set up a brewery in a 150-year-old bank building and you are trying to stay true to the integrity of the building, you have space limitations as well as infrastructure limitations. We spent a few months just investigating whether the building could support the weight, the equipment could fit the space, and if all the venting, plumbing, heating, and electrical systems could support the brewing process.

Our brewhouse space is a compact 16 x 16 space on the main floor of the building and a cold room with the same floor plan directly below. We’re brewing on a custom-made 7-barrel system by Bennett Forgeworks from Ridgeway, Colorado. Typically referred to as the brewhouse, this includes the brew kettle, mash tun, and hot liquor tank. Each batch makes roughly 1750 pints of beer, give or take the angels share. The beer ferments in Letina tanks from Italy and drops into serving tanks in the cold room below. From the serving tanks, it is fed straight up to our tap lines. The beer you drink in the brewpub never journeys outside the space of a few feet from where it’s brewed to where it’s consumed.