Road to the Crown

Chapter 72: Setting up the brewery

12th march 1574

With a sizeable shed built on the huge area just beside the castle and all the resources moved there, I could finally start working on the very first factory I had in my mind. With over three carriages of metal, wood, barrels and all other sorts of goodies I got from the Sandomir, the first Tarnowian Noble brewery would hopefully start its existence today!

With the blueprint for the entire project displayed in the corner of my vision, I moved the first batch of wooden planks to one side and turned it into a simple, big pot with a layer of the iron cast on its outer layer. After adding metal rods to support it above a huge hole intended for a fireplace, I could tell I made a very first step on creating my brewery.

In reality, this simple thing would be used to nothing else than heating up the water, that would later flow through a single, wide pipe to the lower level, where the designated malt would join it and fall down to the big, mashing barrel. But here I encountered my first challenge.

According to the blueprint, below the mashing container, there should be some kind of filtering mechanism. While making one with the system would take me only a moment and a huge amount of iron and wood, the problem laid in assembling it below the mashing barrel, so that there would be not a single gap between the two layers of equipment!

But since there was nothing I could do about it, for now, I decided to ditch this for later moment, when all the other items would be prepared so I could call some servants and ask them to figure that stuff out. If the worst thing would come to be, I could always just get some clay, reinforce the sides of the connecting part with iron and just use fire to stop it from absorbing moisture.

The next part was actually fairly simple. Filtered mash had to flow down to the brewing barrel, with all sorts of additions flowing from yet another set of barrels. After crafting a set of pipes with a varying diameter of the inside, I gathered them all up and pushed into a single, bigger pipe, where all of it could mix and enter the brewing barrel along with the mash. While it looked comical as if some rotten creation of crazy scientist aiming to make his own helicopter. In short, it was just a set of 'L' shaped pipes, connecting their shorter end inside a bigger one, with their long ends sticking out to all directions.

Later on, those longer parts would have to be connected to the barrels containing premade preparations of all kinds, from hemp water, through apple cider and other fruit juices aimed to enhance the taste of the beer I would brew, but for now, I simply let them be. Craft the items first, then ask someone else to assemble it.

Just making this few items took me more than two hours of time, with the only saving grace being the fact that there was only two more steps I had to take to consider this project finished. Despite being near the finishing line already, there was still a lot of resources left, as if my calculations made through the system about the required amounts of all the stuff were wrong, but in reality, the last two steps would use most of them!

After the mash would be properly turned into the brew, it would then flow into a set of barrels, connected through a single, main pipe to the brewing barrel, and with another one that would contain yeast, stolen from the bakery warehouse. Contrary to other breweries, this one wouldn't depend on a special kind of those super tiny shrooms, but on the brew itself instead!

In fact, there should be one more step, of cooling down the brew before pouring it into the fermentation chambers - or barrels since I didn't want to create more complex structures - but in order to simplify the process, I decided that while slowing down the production, the fresh brew would be just left alone to cool down in the barrels, before the yeast would be added to it. After all, this miraculous kind of shrooms would simply die off if placed in the boiling liquid!

And from there on, the process was as simple as it could get. Following the last set of pipes, the ready product would flow down to the last set of mobile barrels, that could be either stored for later use, or directly moved onto carriages and sold on the market!

With everything set and done, I finally found the time to wipe out the sweat from my forehead, while looking at the mess I left in the shack. With all the resources already gone, only about a fifth of the place inside the shack was occupied by the prepared items, that would shrink to about half its volume after assembly.

This alone showed how far I was willing to take this project as soon as I could afford the price of the necessary resources that is! Just the beer and fruits alone were too cheap to bother myself with, yet iron or perfectly fine oak wood wasn't something that I could just splurge on!

Unwilling to waste even more time in this particular place, I simply drew the blueprint for the servants that would come to assemble everything in place, and left the shack, covering barely a hundred meters before I finally got back to the lower castle. From there, a short walk and I reached the gate of the higher part of my home, swiftly reaching for my chambers and falling on top of my bed.

Reaching the Tarnow, having a talk with the noble friends, moving all the resources and even crafting all the items took me the entire day. While I still had to go and at least wash the sweat off my body before going to sleep, I had the feeling that when the sun would finally set over my lands, I would be in for another round of activities!

After all, Pilzno was in Peter's hands, and I wasn't blind enough to not notice the anxiety written on Elia's face when I decided to ignore that fact for now!

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