Logistics

Scattered between the brewery, the cellar and the point of dispense (we'll call it "the bar") we have:

• 47 firkins (had 48 but one has a scratched shive hole)


• 2 fermenters, producing 8 firkins per batch


• 8 auto-tilts on the stillage in the cellar


• 6 beer engines

There is also a limited amount of resources available, especially this time of the year, for the purchase of grain, yeast and hops. The trick is to try to keep at least four cask ales on, with the requirements that there be at least one session beer, one dark (porter or stout) and one IPA. Casks need to rest at least a day for the finings to settle, and some of the stronger and/or dry-hopped ales require more time. A session beer can go to stillage in a week after casking, while some of the stronger and/or dry-hopped ales, again, require more time. Thanks to non-return valves and micro-filters on the shive I can get more than a week out of a slow cask. During the summer the problem becomes swapping them out fast enough.

One the other tricky bits is trying to be patient. Tanninbaum is still aging in the cellar until after Thanksgiving (maybe), and that first cask of Schrodinger's Other Beer is playing the siren every time I drift by. I'm determined to wait until Wednesday for that one.

AAAARRRRRRGGGHH! or Where Can a Man Get a Decent Shive Around Here?

All of you know what a shive is, of course. You are all discerning readers, you've been around the block a few times, traveled a bit, seen some stuff, read the occasional book, taken a few classes; all in all, smart people. All I'm asking is for one of you to politely inform me as to where to go and acquire myself a baggie of a few hundred plastic shives. And don't say Murphy and Son, because they seem to have discovered that the large body of water that separates us is too intractable a medium over which to distribute the nice yellow 52.3 mm units.

This is a giant country - 300 million people or so, from what I'm told. But you'd think I could find a little round piece of plastic to whack into my plastic casks. Apparently not, at least not the right kind. I managed to find a source over on the East Coast that provides the Eurobung shives (at right in picture), but the diameter at the sealing surface is 1 mm too much. They also have a peculiarly designed hole for the spile, which not only takes a more profound whack with the mallet to penetrate, but then engulfs too much of the spile making it difficult to gently remove so as to ascertain the conditioning of the beer

But the shive on the left - ahh, there is a shive to die for. At 52.3 mm at the sealing surface, they mate nicely with the plastic CypherCo firkins. I kept this last used unit as a memorial to what a great shive should strive to become.

So, for all you alert and discerning readers, please contribute to the proper sealing and venting of real ale casks in Oregon by dropping a few hundred workable shives into a cardboard box and mailing it to the Brewers Union Local 180 in beautiful Oakridge, Oregon.