TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands Cooper Island Beachclub Brewery

Any word on whether the new brewery at Cooper is operational? The brewhouse was delivered in the fall. We pinged them in January and it was not up yet.

Cheers, RickG

Wasn't up mid Feb when I was there.

I'll give them a call. No need to stop by by if they're not up and running. We've had some fun at Cooper Island, but the food underwhelms and the rum bar needs a care package from the French islands. But, we'll stop every time for a proper pint.

Cheers, RickG

It was our first time to Cooper and found the restaurant to be decent for the price considering everything is imported. In addition my wife found a great way to spend more money in the gift shop, however the clothing they sell seems to be of great quality which you don't find in most islands.

Does Cooper have their own desalination plant? Or some other source of fresh water other than cisterns? Brewing is a very water-intensive endeavor and I wonder how they'd do it otherwise.

I would imagine they are filtering the H2O from the cistern then (hopefully) making water adjustments in the kettle.

edit to say, in re reading your post I would agree that they would use a shitton of water that doesn't end up as product....I haven't read anything on this in a few years but I think you could find info that states it takes anywhere from 5-50 gallons of water to produce a gallon of beer. There may be a guy or two here ITB that could chime in. <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/dine.gif" alt="" />

I make my own beer time to time. It doesn't take 5-50 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of beer. At most you are looking at ~8 gallons max of drinking water going into 5 gallons of beer. For cooling your beer from boiling to 70 degrees F you will need cold waste water that will go through a chilling coil and not be part of the final product, but seawater can provide this function without much energy other than what it takes to run a pump used.

Wow, that is super duper efficient. Do you not boil off anything or clean or leave anything in your mash tun? Not to mention that there are differing cooling methods as I am sure you know. And the stats from the brewers association would run contrary to your statements.

You know I always forget about cleaning up

If that's the case you know the worst smell in the world is leaving your mash tun until the next day to clean! That's what happens when you drink too much during brew day!

If you include the water used for sanitation before hand, cooling the wort, and cleaning up everything afterwords (including the fermenting tanks after fermentation is done), my guess would be at least 3-4 gallons of water used for each gallon of drinkable beer. Even if you used seawater for chilling, you would have to rinse with plenty of fresh water to avoid corrosion. Any place where water is a seriously limited resource, I can't see the economics working out.