The Early Days
By Clayton on Aug 15 Filed In Uncategorized 1 Comment
When David and I were brewing Sweet Leaf in our “tea hut” as we called it, it looked like something out of the prohibition. There were copper tubes carrying cold water into a big tank (200gal was big back then). High temperature hoses pumped the tea from the copper steam kettle (bought from an old micro brewery in San Marcos, TX) into the cold water tank to cool the tea down (can’t brew it over 5min!) and we filled the bottles (hand labeled) with garden hoses! Our buddy John Cobb (awesome artist in Beaumont) invented the “double no bubble”- it allowed us to fill the bottles twice as fast w/ the garden hoses because the technique kept the tea from foaming up during filling. The tea hut would get up to around 130 degrees in the summer because we were using open flames to heat up the water and not much ventilation! It wasn’t exactly up to OCIA specs but damn the tea tasted good!
love the photo of the cap. i hear the caps also make good belt buckles.