Anheuser Busch

Two things to keep in mind:

1. I tend to rip on big corporations because I find them to be inherently evil. It's not their fault because they have a responsibility to make money. And it's not my fault because I'm cynical.
2. Occasionally I play the hypocrite and drink beer made by the big boys. That said, I do carry a list of all the AB-INBEV, MillerCoors, Pabst, and Heineken brands in my wallet so I always know what I'm drinking.

Great. So now that we got that out of the way, let me start by saying that our tour to Anheuser Busch in Fairfield, CA was by far the best tour we've had since we've been here in Davis. What makes a great brewery tour? The person giving it. Our girl was Julie.

That's Julie. She's been at AB for 8 years. She used to be in the brewing department and a few months ago she moved to QC. In the background those are all pallets full of can lids. Each one of those "logs" holds 500 lids. There are about 450 "logs" per pallet. So that is about 200,000 lids on each pallet. Now you get a feel for the scale of this operation. Their canning line runs at ~2100 cans/minute...

The brewery has 25 separate grain silos. All of them are connected to this central hub on the top floor of the brewery via vacuum tube (think bank teller drive-thru). You can see #22 in the foreground. All once a brew begins, grain is sucked out of the various silos depending on the recipe and mixed in that central hub in the center of the room before falling to the mills.

The Budweiser recipe isn't a secret. It is made out of 70% malted barley and 30% rice. Since I've already showed you so many pictures of malt mills, here is a shot of a rice mill. This room is directly below the last photograph. So the rice is dropped into this mill. The rice mill and malt mill can grind ~400 lbs/min. The malt mill has 6 rollers. The first pair cracks the husk which is then removed with a vibrating sieve and stream of air. The second pair grinds the endosperm further and a vibrating sieve allows the still coarse bits to flow into a third pair of rollers which complete the grind on these last stubborn bits. These three streams are mixed at the end. This type of operation ensures the husk remains in tact to allow good filtration during lautering (filtering) while guaranteeing the highest extract of sugars from he small endosperm of the grain.

Speaking of lautering...now that is a lauter tun. It is 43 ft in diameter and custom built (of course). Since AB-INBEV uses a high amount of adjunct (not malted barley) in their beers, they have to boil that rice, corn, etc. in water first to gelatinize the starch, before combining it with the mash of malted barley. For this reason, they have 2 cereal cookers in addition to their mash tuns. Once the mashing is complete, the whole slurry is pumped into that HUGE lauter tun that Jeff is standing in front of. Batch size is 670 bbl. Think of that this way; the brewery I worked at in New York made less than that over the course of the whole year.

Yeah, it's all controlled by computers. There is just way too much going on to do things manually. Especially since there were only two guys running the whole brewhouse operation. And I got the distinct feeling one of them was from another department and they were just chatting. The wonders of technology.

Those guys were teamsters. As were most of the people we met on our tour. Most of the work at AB-INBEV is done by unions with a small amount of salaried folks to manage things. Apparently after INBEV bought AB in 2008, lots of the "fat" was trimmed and now there are relatively few salaried people on board.

Here is Tim wearing his Bud Light Lime sunglasses next to a box of lime peel powder. He was pretty excited to be at the source until Julie told us they don't make Bud Light Lime at Fairfield and that powder is for Shock Top. When a brewery is as big as AB-INBEV, they don't brew every product in every package at every brewery. AB-INBEV has 12 breweries in the US and 138 total breweries worldwide. They brew something like 14 brands in Fairfield.

I was kind of surprised to see hops that were almost 6 years old. They are pelletized and we did some rubs on the open bags. They weren't too cheesy so it's probably fine. Mostly I figured that AB-INBEV would have a bit better inventory management and contracting to not have pallets of such old hops sitting around. But, likely they know something I don't because they run a pretty tight ship.

This is a hot wort stripper. AB-INBEV is one of the only companies to perform hot wort stripping. Basically, after the wort is boiled it is flooded into this vessel (tall, like 2 floors) and flows down between all of those tubes. Air is blow up through the tubes. The air scrubs out volatiles not volatilized during the boil, theoretically yielding a cleaner product. Next to this, there is a bypass pipe that's used when they brew Rolling Rock. That is not a joke. Rolling Rock has a lot of dimethyl-sulfide (DMS) intentionally. It is part of the flavor profile so AB-INBEV targets this as an important flavor parameter for that particular brand.

That's not a normal looking fermenter! These rectangular fermenters are used in many of the older AB breweries since they were popular before the "modern" invention of the cylindroconical vessel that you think of when you think fermenter. I took this picture by poking my phone right inside the manway. Those pipes you see running around the wall carry glycol for cooling.

Think of this as a sprinkler on steroids. It is called a gamma jet. It is place in the fermenter after the beer has moved to lagering and that head piece spins around really fast in all directions spraying a high pressure jet of water to clean the inside of the fermenter.

After primary fermentation, the beer is sent to the lagering cellar. These tanks are all single walled and don't have any cooling so the whole cellar is held at 28 F. It was 75 F outside that day so most of us were wearing t-shirts and we spent well over an hour in this place. Rookie oversight.

Luckily Julie loaned us some beer-jackets. That is unfiltered Budweiser on day 19 of its 21 day beechwood lagering cycle. It was good. It's not that it was just better than regular Budweiser, it was actually good beer. I wish they sold it like this. And that was my first beer of the afternoon, so it wasn't the beer talking.

New term of the day is "schoene beer." This is beer that has had the yeast removed but has not yet been filtered brite. It is German.

After the beer is filtered it is called brite beer. That's a picture of me through the sight-glass downstream of the filter. Beer is flowing through there incredibly quickly but since it is so brite you can see right through it. Also, I got a free Bud Light hat from the tour so first come first serve.

By the time we got to the tasting room, we'd all had about 3 or 4 beers since we had to try the product all along the way...FOR SCIENCE. Jeff was feeling pretty good. I think that is a Captain Morgan. Don't really know where that came from.

Overall I was quite impressed with Julie and with AB in general. I intentionally leave off the INBEV part there. The people I met seemed like good people and they really cared about the beer they were making. Hell, before they filtered it, I thought the beer was pretty good. I'm not sure I agree with the whole Razz-A-Rita thing that they're doing, but who am I to judge. They are making a killing on some of those brands so more power to them I suppose. That picture is the floor in the elevator. When a brewery thinks things through to the extent of putting floor drains in the elevators, they're doing alright.