Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada is a special place. They operate two, 200 bbl brewhouses and one 100 bbl brewhouse around the clock 365 days a year. Last year they turned out just shy of 1,000,000 bbl of beer. This is not "micro" by any means, but to call it anything short of "craft" would be shortchanging the culture that Ken Grossman has built.

Today we were lucky enough to get a tour of the whole Chico, CA operation. And our version of the tour was extensive. I think it took about two and a half hours. We saw everything from the hop storage to the composter. In between there was a quite a lot of ground we covered and I think the best way to share that is with pictures. I took about a hundred, but I will spare you some of the awful ones as well as some of the super nerdy ones (Read: In line aeration). So welcome to your amateur picture tour of Sierra Nevada.

Sierra Nevada uses 100% whole hops and they are by far the largest brewery in the states to do this. This means no pellets, no extracts, just whole hop cones. Hops come in 200 lb bales. There are 5 guys whose full time job is to break up hop bales for use in the brewery. A hop shipment happened to come in today and we got a taste of what a logistical challenge dealing with these beauties can be. 

Whole hops are bulkier, and do not store as well or long as pelletized hops or hop extracts. A new hop shipment comes in about once per month and at any time the brewery has about three months worth of hops on hand. Hop storage is variety dependent, but on average aroma hops will be safe to use for about one year and bittering hops will last about two. Outside the hop cooler is a huge white board that maps the location of everything. Each black box is a different variety of hop and the numbers represent how many bales of hops are in stock. Add all those numbers up and multiply by 200 to figure out how many pounds of hops are in the cooler...

Hops are probably the most iconic of brewing ingredients, but they don't do the heavy lifting. That burden is left to the malt. What you are looking at here is as two roll wet mill. Malt is augered into the top steep tank and soaked in water to help soften the husk a bit. It is then milled by a pair of hardened steel rollers set to a specific distance apart. The goal is to crush the interior of the malt (endosperm) while leaving the husk largely intact. A wet mill is advantageous because the soaking causes the husk to be more pliable and thus a finer crush can be obtained with minimal husk damage. This mill grinds 10,000 lbs of malt in 25 minutes. 

The slurry is pumped into the mash tun (fills bottom right of photo). The milled malt is mixed with hot water in the mash tun and stirred for about 25 minutes. The time and temperature(s) of this mashing result in different amount of extract (sugar) from the malt with varying levels of fermentability. After the mashing is complete, the mash slurry is pumped into a lauter tun. 

This is a large shallow vessel with a false bottom (think heavy duty screen). Sorry there's no picture but it was lautering when we were walking through and it's pretty steamy so tough to get a feel for what is going on. I did take a good shot from the lower story (these vessels are so large the tops are in the ground floor and the bottoms are in the basement!) The lauter tun has knives on a raking arm that raise and lower into the bed to help the wort run off of the grain. Remember the husk we were talking about earlier? Now it come in handy because it acts as the filter bed to help prevent particulate from the mash from leaving the lauter tun. It also has a sparging arm that sits above the grain bed to spray the grain with hot water to help rinse all of the extract from the grain. Underneath, a dozen or so tube (look like a giant spider) allow the wort to run off into a central grant that is then pumped to the kettle. Since the lauter tun is so large, if only one tube were used, the pressure would cause a huge suction at the center of the tun equaling bad news. Lautering takes about 90-120 minutes depending on the beer.

The products of lautering are sweet wort and spent grain. The grain, still wet, gets pumped to a storage silo where truck from local farms come to carry it away to hungry cows. The sweet wort (think full bodied sugar water) is pumped into the kettle to be boiled for 90-120 minutes depending on the beer. During this time hops are added at different times depending on lots of fun recipe stuff. This is me standing in front of one of the kettles. I'm in the center.

After the boil, we're left with hopped wort, trub, and hop material. Trub (coagulated protein from boiling) and hops are filtered out with a hop-back which is basically a filter that uses the hop material as a filter bed. These spent hops are pneumatically blown out of the filter to be composted later on site.

The hopped wort is pumped out into a plate heat exchanger where it is cooled by glycol from 100°C to 60°C (depending on the beer) in a matter of a few minutes. The cooled wort is dosed with oxygen and yeast on it's way to the fermenter. Below are the yeast brinks (tanks). Those pipes that look like grab bars in handicap restrooms can be rearranged like puzzles to send different fluids different places. This way yeast from any of those three tanks can be sent to a number of different locations and cleaning solution from a single reservoir can be sent to any one of those tanks. Pretty clever huh?

Fermenters at Sierra Nevada are no joke. Most of their fermeters are 800 bbl. To give you some perspective, that is 264000 bottles of beer per fermenter.  Now count the fermenters:

This was only one part of one wing of the brewery. And what you are looking at is only the bottom cones of the fermemters. The tops stick upward, outside, for a few stories. It takes 4 batches of beer from the 200 bbl brewhouse to fill one of these which helps to decrease variability between batches, and same floorspace.

Have you ever had Torpedo Extra IPA? It is the most popular IPA in the States. Those four vessles you see on the floor are it's namesake. Ken Grossman invented the hop-torpedo some years ago as a means of ensuring more efficient and reliable dry hopping. Each of those vessels is packed with about 80 lbs of whole hops and beer is pumped from the bottom of the fermenter, through the torpedos (in parallel), and back up into the middle of the fermenter. This happens continuously for about 4 days ensuring all of the beer cycles through the torpedo twice.

Packaging is serious business at Sierra Nevada. They bottle in 12 and 22 oz with crown caps, they do 500 ml corked and caged bottles, and they do 12 and 16 oz cans. Look closely and you'll see that that dark rectangle in the middle of the photo is actually full, capped beers. Wow.

Here you can see cases being fed in below the bottles while the bottles are split off into blocks of 12. Then the cases are built around the bottles. Check out those awesome vertical helix conveyor belts. You know that someone has ridden those at one time or another.

Lots of the machines have automatic sensors on them to make sure that bad bottles are not making it out the door. So the sensors test the bottles, but who will test the sensors? These guys:

Each of these bottles has an intentional defect. They are periodically run through the bottling line to make sure that the sensors are calibrated correctly. If the sensor spits the bottle out, everything is dandy.

Here's a really quick video just to give you an idea of the pace of which everything moves. If there is one hiccup anywhere along the way, everything gets held up. I have no idea how many moving parts there are in this operation but it is amazing to me that everything in this room can function together in such harmony. In a single day they turn out 900,000 bottles of beer.

Sierra Nevada also does kegs of course. Here's a lineup of full kegs ready to be palletized and distributed. Keg filling is a pretty cool sight to see. We wizzed through the kegging operation so I didn't get a good picture but basically, the keg is turned upside down and "tapped" onto a series of stations that empty, clean, rinse, sanitize, cool, and fill it. This is accomplished through a walking conveyor belt that makes the lines of kegs look like waves on an ocean as they are picked up from one station and placed down at the next one.

I don't really know how the distribution laws work in California but boy that's a lot of trucks.

The whole culture here is about sustainability. About 80% of the electricity is generated on site with solar panels and fuel cells. There are panels on most every bit of roof everywhere as well as over the parking lots. The new brewery in Mills River is going to be LEED Gold or Platinum depending on how the paperwork shakes out.

In addition to electricity generation, all food waste from the restaurant and employees is combines with that of the brewery and composted in this lovely screw conveyor. In 10 days it is able to do what a compost pile does in 1 year.

All of the restaurant oil is used to make biodiesel to help offset the fleet. Look at this reactor and the number of trucks they have on the road, it's clear this is not a significant contribution, but it all adds up.

So that concludes our tour. I am sorry for some of the missing photos or explaination. If you have questions, you can ask me or google it. There are much better photos and videos of all this stuff on the internet. I mostly just wanted to photo-brag to all of you to show you what I saw today. Of course the day finished off right with lunch and as much free beer as we could drink courtesy of a great man and a great brewery. Cheers!