For all the talk of innovation and unorthodoxy in craft beer, there’s often a reluctance from established brewers to reach beyond the conventional equipment and processes that comprise the typical brewery workflow.
Whether you’re obsessed with hazy IPA, cranking out high-gravity stouts, or deep-diving into esoteric styles, everyone seems to be using some variation of the same arrangement: mash tun, lauter tun, kettle, whirlpool. It’s a familiar, flexible, efficient process, and brewers understand it well. It’s common because it works at almost any scale with minimal complexity.
However, there’s one alternative that’s found a home at many large-scale breweries, especially in Europe: the mash-filter press—also known as the mash press or mash filter.
I first wrote about mash filters in an early edition of this column almost a decade ago, in the October-November 2016 issue. While that article was focused on Brouwerij West’s adoption of the equipment—virtually unique for a craft brewery at the time—it left me imagining a future where more intrepid brewers would take up the comparatively novel technology as a creative outlet.
A decade later, has the mash filter made more of a splash in the American craft-beer scene? I spoke with a handful of brewers using the tech to find out.