Black Sheep - Gallery
The Black Sheep Brewery logo
The brewery was once Lightfoot's maltings in Masham
The entrance to the visitors facilities
The Black Sheep portfolio on sale
The Black Sheep Bistro
Black Sheep Bitter pump clip
The new cask racking room - on the right is the brewhouse
Casks arrive on the 'Sheepy Shifter' from the local depot
Off loading empty casks for washing
Diesel fork lift clamp truck taking casks to the line
View of the line built by Microdat; dirties in on the right, debung, wash, label and rekeystone, fill and seal, palletise and away
The truck driver moves the locator board from a layer of empties to a layer of fulls
Making sure the keystone is uppermost, the casks pass to the deshive and dekeystoning machine
Casks enter the washing machine
The rear of the Microdat cask washer
The washer has 10 stations
View of the discharge end. The cask is upended and an operator places a new keystone into the aperture...
...a machine presses it home and the Logopak machine adds a label
The four lane filling machine
The filling head has two stations, this one fills the cask...
...then the beer head disengages, the operator places a shive in the aperture and the frame moves back and the shive is pressed home
An operator oversees the machinery and places a shive over the bung hole once the filling head disengages
The Velderflex pumps for metering in the isinglass finings
Four cleaning nozzles for the beer heads
The cask is upended and heads towards the camera for palletising
A completed three layer pallet is created by the truck operator
This fiercesome device will grab a cask inside the chime and lift it on to flat pallets as required by some customers
Inside the brewhouse
The old mash tun, you can just about see the grist case above and the underback taps below
The original mash tun (and copper) came from Hartleys at Ulverston
The old copper dates from 1947, Grange Engineering in Burton on Trent fitted a stainless inside
The manway is not visible from the visitors walkway
The external calandria for the copper
Head Brewer Paul Ambler with the new mash tun which was built by Grange Engineering.
The spent grain chutes...
...and two positive displacement Seepex pumps
In the hop room
Hops from Kent...
Hops from Sussex...
...and hops from Herefordshire
Head Brewer Paul Ambler rubs the hops
The new mash tun side commissioned in 2004
Grange Engineering's Steels masher and grist case
Yorkshire square 'rounds' built new by Shobwood in Burton on Trent
The operator is cropping the yeast from the left hand 'square' - note the rousing fantail on the righthand FV
Cropping the yeast
A venerable slate square rescued from Darleys at Thorne
A slate square in action
A round square in action
The top floor is domed for strength, the starting wort level will touch the underside of the floor at the periphery leaving 100mm freeboard under the hole
Operators Dan Scott Paul and Steve Wilson
Brewers Astrid Hewitt and Alan Dunn
Maturation vessels
The beer processing block
