The Nightshift: Brewers and their yeast work all night

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It's 3 a.m., and while there may be a phone ringing at the WhiteHouse, there are also a lot of other things going on. Taking ourcue from Sen. Hillary Clinton's earlier political ads, the PGcontinues its occasional series looking at what kinds of jobs folksare doing at 3 a.m. Today we go to the Penn Brewery at the foot of Troy Hill.
On a night so humid you could wring the air out like a wet dishtowel, it doesn't seem to matter that the door is propped open andthere are two fans whirring -- Nick Rosich is hot.
Dressed in a yellow T-shirt and khaki shorts, his face glisteningwith sweat, he slides open the small door of the giant copperkettle and plunges a long wooden stick into the bubbling liquid.
On his right calf is a tattoo of Kermit the Frog with red dragonson either side of it.
He brings the stick up to look at its markings. The liquid is notquite up to the desired 35 hectoliter mark. He closes the kettledoor.
Now it's time to check the yeast because in beer brewing, that'swhat it's all about -- yeast.
There's always a little something to do here and there at the PennBrewery and in the wee hours of a recent Friday morning, Rosich isthe one doing it.
The Chicago-born brewer who moved to New Castle at age 10, is thelone man on duty during an overnight beer-making shift. However,unlike the Maytag repairman, there is plenty to keep him busy.
His day began at 11:30 a.m. and by 1 a.m. he is well into thebrewing of Penn Pilsner, the brewery's most popular liquidrefreshment.
"We brew through the night once or twice a week now that we'recoming into the busy season," says Andrew Rich, brewerymanager/head brewer who comes in around 4 a.m. "Nick will staythrough the night a couple of times to keep it going."
Rich, 40, wears a T-shirt bearing a quote from Kaiser Wilhelm:"Give Me a Woman Who Truly Loves Beer and I Will Conquer theWorld."
Right now, with 4-month-old twin boys and a 2-year-old son, he'sconquering fatherhood while also trying to keep up with the hugedemand for output from his small brewery.
"It's really putting a strain on us to produce as much as everybodywants," he says.
Penn Brewery, which also has a restaurant featuring German food,produces 650 cases or 15,600 bottles of beer a day.
Beer drinking is easy.
Beer making? Not so much.
"Everybody thinks there's beer waterfalls ... everywhere," Richsays. "It's a good work but it's hot, dirty work."
It's a work that takes Rosich back and forth between thesunset-like glow of the brew room with it's copper-colored kettles,terra-cotta tile floor and red-painted beams to the fermentationcellar, which is actually a room with bright lights, metal tanksand octopus-like red tubing across the floor.
The air is pungent in the fermentation room and Rosich explainsthat it's probably the peracetic acid used to clean the tanks.
"It's pretty nasty stuff," he says. "It binds to all organic matterand helps remove it."
Later in the shift, when he cleans one of the tanks, the brewerdons rubber gloves and goggles to mix 4 ounces of peracetic acid to31 gallons of water.
"I started making mead at 18," Rosich says, recalling his entreinto beer making.
After constant reminders from his mother that making alcoholicbeverages at 18 was illegal, he quit. Three years later, at thelegal age of 21, he started making beer at home.
A couple of months later, he brought his parents some ale, hisfather's favorite drink.
His dad loved it.
I said, 'Oh, by the way Dad, I made it,' " Rosich explains.
Despite his interest in beer making, he entered Youngstown StateUniversity to study criminal justice. But he decided he preferredthe rubber boots and harsh detergents he uses in the beer-makingprocess to guns and bullet-proof vests.
So Rosich enrolled at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicagoto take brewing courses such as yeast growth and fermentation, wortboiling and the always popular hops. Rich also studied there.
There's a lot of science involved in beer-making: organicchemistry, fermentation, aeration. It's enough to make your eyesglaze over when Rosich begins explaining the process.
Penn Brewery employs the German technique. In fact, when founderTom Pastorius opened the Penn Brewery in 1986 on the site of theold Eberhardt & Ober Brewery on the North Side, he brought overeverything from Germany, including the fermentation and aging tanksand the kegging and bottling equipment.
Even the controls are in German. The ingredients come from Germany,too. The brewery buys a year's supply of hop extract, which comesin cans, and hop pellets.
It's about 2:30 a.m. and once Rosich checks the level of the wort,the sugary liquid created by the "mashing" of malted barley that'sboiling in the brew kettle, he traipses past the storage areastacked with mini-kegs to an outside shed to get a sample of theyeast. Rosich opens the spigot of a tank that stores the yeast andthe thick yellowish goop plops into a big white plastic bucket.
It doesn't look like anything you want to put into something you'regoing to consume.
But as we said before, it's all about the yeast, which will makealcohol by fermentation in the wort.
Back inside the brewery office/mini-lab, Rosich puts a little yeastonto a slide to look at under a microscope to check the yeastviability. He wants more live yeast cells than dead ones becauseafter all . . . well, you know.
The yeast live cell count is right where it needs to be at 95percent. The yeast solid-to-liquid ratio is good, too, so Rosichdoes a little work on the computer until it's time to measure outthe hop pellets and open a can of hop extract, which looks kind oflike concentrated seaweed.
It's 2:53 a.m. and in about 30 minutes, Rosich will lower theextract into the boiling wort.
When Rich comes in, he gets an update from his overnight brewer andadds the first bowl of hop pellets to the mixture about 4:15 a.m.By the time the sun comes up, the yeast will be added, then themixture will be cooled and oxygen added to make a betterenvironment for -- the yeast.
By the time the process is completed, the Penn Pilsner brewedduring Rosich's shift should be ready for shipment in early August.
But he's not waiting until then. Around 5:15 a.m. at the end of hisnearly 18-hour day, he's sitting at the bar in the restaurantenjoying one of the perks of the job from a Pilsner glass.
"Lotta times," he says, "at the end of a long shift, it's nice."