My name is Nick Konwerski and I'm the head brewer at 3 Floyds.
I believe that BrauKon is one of the best brewery engineers in the world
and we wanted to work with somebody of that calibre to put together our breweries for the company.
My name is Mark Rieth and I am the owner at Atwater Brewery and we're located in downtown Detroit, Michigan
and we're lucky enough to get an upgraded BrauKon brew house a couple of years ago.
What we really liked about our BrauKon - because we make German style lagers - is to have that technology but also the ability to make
higher gravity ales. The software system is very important to us - all those combined with obviously the great people that work for BrauKon.
My name is Matt Cole, I'm the owner and brew master at Fat Heads.
The automation that we had in our brewery allows us to still be hands-on but also have repeatability, consistency and obviously quality.
I do like the HopBack Pro, it's kind of oversized. We do a lot of wet-hopped beers in the fall, so that's probably my favorite.
My name is John Trogner from Tröegs Brewing Company. I'm a co-owner and brother of Tröegs Brewing Company.
I happened to got to a trade show and I was asking around at different suppliers, talking about the idea I had
and they all looked at me like I had ten heads. Until I met Markus. He was able to open our eyes to a lot of different options, so we talked about
the beers we wanted to make, he talked about the engineering side and the equipment side and it kind of just mashed and worked out well.
It was awesome, it was a huge turning point for us. So having that science behind our art was exactly what we needed
and that's the point where our beers just became so much better.
My name is Branch Rothschild, I started brewing here at Allagash about 12 years ago and I'm the brew house manager here.
I first heard of BrauKon when we were looking to expand our brew house. We had a 30 barrel brew house that we were brewing
45 - 50 batches a week on and knew it was time that we had to get a bigger brew house. So we reached out and
BrauKon was one of the people we came to at Craft Brewers Conference and they were incredibly flexible and seemed to understand.
We make an unusual beer using unusual ingredients and they seemed the most flexible in terms of letting us use different ingredients
and changing their equipment to match our process rather than us changing our process to match some idea of what a brew house should be.
My name is Jim Carleton. I've been a brewer for about 15 years and I'm the tap room brewing manager for Sam Adams.
BrauKon was chosen for a wide variety of factors. I think BrauKon had a strong interest in working with us as much as we had a
strong interest in working with BrauKon. But certainly the level of technical expertise, the level of customer service
and just the craftsmanship were some of the factors that went into that.
My name is Shaun Hill and I'm the owner of Hill Farmstead Brewery.
What I felt confident about in conversations with BrauKon is that they understood what my goals were. And of all of the German equipment
companies that we had quotes from they were the only ones that seemed really interested in helping me make Hill Farmstead beer.
The improvement we've seen with the BrauKon system is mostly one of consistency. We can repeat the same brews over and over
with the same timings and generally the same results. We obviously have to make changes depending on raw materials
but it makes it a lot easier to maintain a consistent product.
A very common comment that I've heard throughout the last many years, especially from various equipment manufacturers, has been
"Why are you are trying to do it that way" or "That's not how you do it, this is how you do it"  and BrauKon
has been very receptive and intrigued by the process variables that we've introduced. I actually think that some of that some of the ideas
have perhaps led to innovations or new ideas within BrauKon because of the receptivity. Thankfully it became a bit of a partnership
through that mutual understanding. And that's been fruitful.
I would say definitely efficiencies and utilization of hops. We did put a heat exchanger from the kettle to the whirl pool
so we've cast out cooler wort to get less ISO alpha and more essential oils in our wort.
So that's been a big one. Really, just the overall efficiency of the brewery has been a vast improvement for us.
Building a system to be as flexible as possible was super important to us. Now we have three different BrauKon brew houses.
We have everything from a 3 barrel to 15 to 100, so that gave us super flexibility in regards to creativity.
Once those creative doors were open we can play around, find the recipes we liked. Maybe more importantly,
it's incredibly consistent so once we find what we want recipe wise we're able to program in a consistent brew
of that creative recipe every single time and that was huge.
Through adopting BrauKon technology I think our beer became smoother, we had better foam and really good stability
for me personally it provided stability in the sense of confidence in the repeatability of the process.
We currently have a 50hl system, two vessel, and we also have two 5hl smaller systems and it's been really nice because it's consistent
having the same brewing equipment. We've had really good experience with the follow-up and it's been a really great experience.
The best memories are usually over beer talking about something we either want to solve for or something we want to in the future do.
And just having that constant back and forth conversation and helping us see things in different ways. It breaks open our imagination,
we're able to come up with much, much more creative beers while having BrauKon part of the conversation.
I always enjoy the different personalities of everybody that works at BrauKon and their friendliness and willingness
to help us improve our product here at 3Floyds.
And we keep growing in an industry that is challenging to grow in, especially in the middle of a market,
and a lot of that is based on quality and BrauKon has helped us produce quality products.
It's always been great having various BrauKon employees come here and visit.
They seem to have a lot of respect for the beer that we're making.
I think our visits with BrauKon have changed the Allagash culture to some degree. We take our cheers-ing much more seriously
with some intense eye contact as part of it. We don't just look into the eye, we look into the soul.
You know we've had some good times, we've had some rough times. Commissioning is never easy when you're talking about
a very sophisticated brewery. It's been an enlightening experience and very rewarding as well.
We've had a lot of vendors and a lot of relationships with manufacturers in the past
but no one put more heart and effort into it more than BrauKon.
