It’s more Than Just The Beer — A Day In The LIfe Of An Indiana Craft Brewery

By Gordon Lang of Indiana On Tap

We all love craft beer, yet our understanding of the intricacies and day-to-day work that actually goes into producing great craft beer is often a mystery. I spoke with Triton Brewing Co-Founders Jon Lang, Head Brewer, and David Waldman, Director of Operations. The two of them gave their insights on what it’s like running a commercial brewery.

The typical day usually begins at 7am when assistant brewer Mike Hess arrives at the brewery. His first task usually entails bringing 1,300 to 1,450 pounds of grain into the brewery and crushing the grain. While Hess prepares the grain, another employee works ahead of him by cleaning all of the brewing equipment. With the equipment clean and the grain crushed, Hess begins by combining the grain with hot water, and the brew day officially begins. Hess and Lang work closely together throughout the brewing process; adding specific amounts of grain and hops, boiling the unfermented beer, transferring the beer to various tanks and containers, and finally adding the yeast to begin the fermentation process.

“Brew days vary in length,” says Waldman, “but the average on a single batch is about 8 hours. A double batch is about 12 hours.”

As far as a timeline for the beer, Waldman tells me that from Day 1 of the brewing process it takes about 10-14 days until the beer is bottled or kegged.

“It can be on the shelf as early as 2-3 days after packaging,” Waldman added.

Brewing a new batch of beer is only one small part of the day. Triton is brewing about 5-6 batches per week, so multi-tasking is key in order to keep their production moving. These responsibilities include transferring previous batches to new tanks, carbonating the finished beer, building packaging, bottling and kegging, and cleaning used tanks and equipment. 

“We’re janitors first, and brewers second,” stresses Lang. 

He says that for every eight hours of brewing they’re cleaning for 24. Waldman agrees that cleaning is the bulk of the job.

“That’s mostly what we do, with sporadic bursts of brewing in between.” 

Thorough cleaning is one of the most important tasks in the daily operation of a brewery. If equipment is dirty, that could lead to a bad batch of beer. 

“Yes, I have poured beer down the drain,” Lang shared. 

“We want to keep a quality of a certain height…it will kill our reputation if we put bad beer on the market.” 

Laughing to himself, he quickly did the math on a calculator and estimated a loss of $19,000 in potential sales for a bad batch of beer. 

“This is a very passionate group of guys, it’s a really sad day when we need to get rid of beer, but we all understand we have to.”

It’s easy to imagine the brewing industry as overly laid back, with a lot of beer drinking and hanging out with friends, but Lang and Waldman’s experience has been a bit different. 

“A lot of times we’re working so hard we just blow through lunch and don’t even realize it,” Lang tells me. 

Not that they don’t love their job. The owners of Triton are clearly passionate about their work, but cite a high degree of physicality and a work environment that is in constant motion where employees routinely put in 12-hour days. 

A large part of their day-to-day responsibilities don’t even directly involve making beer. 

“We spend a lot of time dealing with the government,” says Lang, “between recipe approval, label approval…as you know the government takes time.” 

Another task that keeps the guys at Triton busy is repairs and upgrades. There are new tasks to be completed every week and there is always something in need of repair. It just so happens Lang is a brewery’s jack-of-all-trades, able to repair and update as needed. Lang added that Triton Brewing is in the process of organizing the delivery of new tanks to increase their brewing capacity. Just starting out, this will include moving two furnaces, re-routing natural gas lines, and obtaining a crane to move the new tanks in to the brewery.

Every craft brewery in Indiana operates differently and has their own set of challenges. Some have been around for a decade, and others just months. The one thing they have in common is the knowledge of how much work goes in to starting and operating a successful brewery.