Interns, Maple Syrup and the Exploding Pilot Brew

We currently have 2 awesome interns here at BrewDog, Brett (from Canada) and Tobias (from Denmark). They are currently just over 2 months into their 6 month stint working as assistant brewers at BrewDog HQ, they have both been doing a pretty stellar job and both are evangelically passionate about great craft beer. Consequently, last Friday, we decided it would be cool to let them loose on our 50L pilot plant to design and brew their own beer.

They diligently and somewhat excitedly put together the recipe for a Maple Syrup Imperial Stout with the all veracity of a diligent and somewhat excited beaver building a dam. They also gave the beer a silly name (I forgave them) before cleaning the pilot plant and putting together the malt and hops for the tiny brew.  Our 50L pilot brews perfectly fill a keg so the intention was to serve the single keg at BrewDog Aberdeen on the night before they left to return to Canada and Denmark respectively.

They mashed in under the watchful eye of our rock ‘n roll brewer Red.

I decided to help with the hopping (hope you like my cardigan – I own 7 cardigans – does that make me a gay?)

Brett goes all stereotypically Canadian and lavishes the beer with maple syrup at the end of the boil.

So all was well and the wort was cooled, tasting great and transferred into an adapted keg which we use to ferment our pilot batches. So far, so good. Our international intern beer started to ferment and our intrepid young brewers went home happy. However, the pressure release valve on the adapted fermenter was not working correctly (or was maybe not properly checked…….), and through the night the pressure build up caused the seal to explode and sent most of the beer exploding out of the keg.

A pretty sad end to something which started out so promisingly. We are debating whether to let them loose on the pilot system again. Should we?