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I will have to keep that in mind. Thats pretty good.
James
sounds like a good plan and the kitbashing sounds good as well
Great thread, and from what I’ve read so far, all really great information.
I too, model a brewery and along the way I’ve come up with a bit of knowledge, discovering what happens at a regional brewery in New Ulm.
Remember that we need Malt…as in malted barley. One of you buildings could do the malting and mash (primary fermentation) process and another the ageing/conditioning and bottling. Often over looked in the beer making process is the wash building, both for the returning kegs and let us remember that in 196 returnable bottles were the going thing. Also, breweries need a lot of heat, remember a boiler house, or at least a goody stack, and depending on the size of your brewery, you may also want to model a water tower.
RE: Hops…Fresh hops, especially in the 60’s would have arrived by rail in iced reefers, mostly from the North West Coast. Even pelletized hops retain freshness best when refrigerated, so I doubt that any hops would be stored in conventional grain storage bins.
The finished beer itself need not be shipped in reefers, but often was to help stabilize the temperature of the beer…The reefers were, however, seldom if ever iced.
Lastly, I can only speak for myself here as the Brewmister (home-brewer) regarding your “loads in”. In my brewing I only use, Malts, Grains, Hops, Yeast and of course water. So…Boxcars, covered hoppers and reefers make all the sense. Grains, malts, bottling supplies…and so on, can arrive in the boxcar. Covered hoppers were gaining in use at this time also, so a mix of boxcar (grain use only) and covered hoppers for incoming grain would add some diversity.
With that said…I think I need a cold one!
Here is a link to some photos of Brewery’s through out history…
http://www.beerhistory.com/gallery/
Thank you for your insignts. I will keep them under consideration as I further work on the details of this project.
James
In my life time commercial breweries have used CO2 to carbonate the beer in the bottle. You will need a bulk tank and tank cars to make deliveries. Us home-brewers let the yeast carbonate the beer in the bottles but the big boys don’t like the sludge it leaves in the bottom of the bottle.
Good luck and keep us posted on the progress.
Another car movement you might want is to have an occasional small coal hopper hauling out busted glass.
Stacks of beer kegs allover the loading dock would be great too.
Having lived and worked in the shadow of the Anheuser-Bush brewery in Williamsburg, VA, I can tell you that most of the answers you got so far are mostly correct. The hops and other grains come to the brewery, 24/7 in covered hoppers. They are unloaded indoors and the hops are taken to the masher, the first step in processing. I won’t go into the details and specifics as the beer police will come after me, but all of the processing is done inside one huge building, and the 1 billion or so cans of beer produced every year are loaded 24/7 by both truck and rail for distribution to all points of the compass.
This operation clearly shows that rail service is not just done, but is the only method of transportation that can move the amount of hops needed for beer production. You can model your brewery any way you want, but let the first building be the masher, and the last be the bottling room/loading dock. Just as important is the waste product facility- you can’t cook 800 tons of hops and just dump the residue down the sewer. Ship the waste out also in a covered hopper cars, designated “waste product use only” for that added touch of realism.
Got my hopes all pumped up and excited, seen the word beer and had to go check it out.
Looks like you have done allot od homework on what you have planned, send us some pics when you get going on it. This sounds kind of fun to do, I don’t have a brewery on my layout, but have thought about a small one, never could decide on the name though.
Don’t worry I will. BUt right now I got everything up in the air because I was in the middle of a move when I became unemployed. I will post pictures when I get it done.
James
Ooopps!
I omitted a major part of my thought process on the brewery complex in my first post.
Grain bins aren’t a bad way to go (I was going to do that but found that most breweries didn’t).
And, in regard to a question already posted…Do we have enough storage space with a few bins? Storage for the grains is essential, especially if we are doing the malting to?
I used a Con-Cor Grain elevator kit in my brewery diorama. It’s small enough to make it seem to fit, yet seemingly big enough to handle all that in-coming grain.
Walthers and others have done some kits too, or even some PVC pipes cut to length, glued together and some sort of roof will make for a very impressive storage facility! It could even be a shallow relief, right against the backdrop.
One other mistake I made in my post, was to refer to the initial boil as a “mash” (just reciting what had already been stated). In reality…The first boil of the ingredients or “soup” as I call it, is actually a “wort”. After the boil, to precipitate out the solids, this wort is then put into primary fermentation, then secondary, then the Kraeusening or conditioning/finishing before bottling.
Thank You for your additional information That was something I was not aware of.
James
Brewers would use the locally available water, rather than purchasing anything bottled. For the quantities involved, it would be way too expensive. Plus, they probably wouldn’t be getting anything they couldn’t produce themselves by treating the local supply.
The breweries that i’ve seen have tended to be mainly one large building. It may have started off small, and have been added to over the years, so that it looks like a polyglot, but they were all interconnected. That is, additions were made to the pre-existing building, rather than building a new free-standing building, and running pipes to it. It may depend on the size of the brewery, though.
-Ed
Again…Great thread!
It is true that most buildings at a brewery are not “stand alone” although some are/were. One that I visited actually had buildings on both sides of a street!
This is a kit-bash paradise with all sort of buildings and building materials added to one another as the brewery morphs. But, if you add a stand alone building, slightly separated from the others…Piping and walkways connecting those stand alones can be very interesting and fun too. I’ve only been to one large brewery (Anheuser-Bush) and YES…it is all one very big building. Impressive in size, but really not all that interesting to look at.
I think a major question to ask, is what era is being modeled? Newer = more sterile looking and larger / older = more ornate and busier with piping, appliances and so on.
Along with that, the size of the brewery and / or method of brewing will determine the raw products and the rail cars in-bound. The two (I guess you call them local or regional) breweries that I’ve been to here in MN are Schell’s and Summit (no where near the size of the giants) and the brewing process is still done the old way, with out forced fermentation and carbonation. Therefore, no CO2 or (don’t know if these are used by the big boys or not) malt/hop slurries/extracts… “tangerine-jack”, if you can tell us…Any input on that?
BTW, “bukwrm” and “tangerine-jack”, just out of curiosity (not that I would have CO2 service at my modeled small/local/brewery and I only use it to “power” the taper here at the home “Brauhaus”) does the CO2 come to the brewery in rail tank cars? I didn’t see that while at Anheuser-Bush, but hey…Do those cars end up inside the building too?
And with that question…I could easily get off topic here, maybe fodder for another thread!!! Maybe just fodder!!
Not to ruffle any feathers here (after all, those of us that love beer, love whatever beer we love) but in comparing the BIG and the LITTLE breweries along the lines of there methods of production…
It got me pumped up and excited to the point that i had to pour me a draught!
Bringing the CO2 in on rail cars makes sense to me. I don’t really know how they get it but for the quantities they would need it seems likely that it would be supplied by rail.
Check out “The Complete Joy of Home Brewing” by Charles Papazian from the library. It will give you a good idea how the big boys do it and how it was done in the past. I have not brewed any since I moved and lost my gas stove. It is hard to boil 5 gallons of water on an electric range. I always used natural carbonation, sweetened the beer at bottling and let the yeast pressurize the bottle. I never even had one bottle explode but my brother was not so lucky.
I would like to have a brewery on my layout but I will have to give up some realism to do it. All of Cincinnati’s breweries were closer to downtown or across the river in Kentucky. If my research does not turn up a small brewery on the CG&P at least I can haul beer in.
Speaking again only about the Williamsburg, VA brewery, external CO2 is not used in the processing of Budweiser Beers, the carbonation is a 100% natural process of the beech wood ageing (yes they use real beech wood in the larger tanks). I don’t remember ever seeing any CO2 deliveries, if they did get any it was an ubersecret operation well away from any public scrutiny. I did however look into the larger tanks on occasion and see nice little bubbles forming on the wood.
I would suggest modeling a micro brewery, there are several in my area that are quite interesting architecturally speaking. You will then have the freedom to hodge-podge a number of buildings and styles without any issues of authenticity arising. I agree that almost all modern big name breweries are sterile looking single, but huge, buildings. Not very interesting, but golly they smell great!
I would think that whatever you chose for grain storage would be sufficient. A brewery doesn’t make money on storing grain or hops, so you only need enough storage to justify maybe one or two day’s worth of product brewing. At Williamsburg, the storage is almost nil as the hops are taken directly to the wort room for processing upon delivery. If anything is stored, it stays in the hopper car until needed. Anheuser-Bush owns its own farms and therefore has 100% control over deliveries of raw materials, so it is possible for them to deliver to themselves the exact amount needed for a production run.
And to answer your question, in Williamsburg they only make 100% real beer, no artificial ingredients or chemical short cuts in processing. Quality is assured through high tech monitoring and highly skilled brewers (I asked the Brewmeister how I could get his job, he said “study biology, life sciences and buisiness administration, then bring me your 4.0 GPA and we’ll talk, anything less and you can work for Coors, but not here”). However, beer is like stew, there are thousands of ways to do it, some ways are better than othe
[quote]
QUOTE: Originally posted by tangerine-jack
Speaking again only about the Williamsburg, VA brewery, external CO2 is not used in the processing of Budweiser Beers, the carbonation is a 100% natural process of the beech wood ageing (yes they use real beech wood in the larger tanks). I don’t remember ever seeing any CO2 deliveries, if they did get any it was an ubersecret operation well away from any public scrutiny. I did however look into the larger tanks on occasion and see nice little bubbles forming on the wood.
I would suggest modeling a micro brewery, there are several in my area that are quite interesting architecturally speaking. You will then have the freedom to hodge-podge a number of buildings and styles without any issues of authenticity arising. I agree that almost all modern big name breweries are sterile looking single, but huge, buildings. Not very interesting, but golly they smell great!
I would think that whatever you chose for grain storage would be sufficient. A brewery doesn’t make money on storing grain or hops, so you only need enough storage to justify maybe one or two day’s worth of product brewing. At Williamsburg, the storage is almost nil as the hops are taken directly to the wort room for processing upon delivery. If anything is stored, it stays in the hopper car until needed. Anheuser-Bush owns its own farms and therefore has 100% control over deliveries of raw materials, so it is possible for them to deliver to themselves the exact amount needed for a production run.
And to answer your question, in Williamsburg they only make 100% real beer, no artificial ingredients or chemical short cuts in processing. Quality is assured through high tech monitoring and highly skilled brewers (I asked the Brewmeister how I could get his job, he said “study biology, life sciences and buisiness administration, then bring me your 4.0 GPA and we’ll talk, anything less and you can work for Coors, but not here”). However, beer is like stew,
Here is an overhead view of one Los Angeles area brewry: http://tinyurl.com/bbkvz
Here is another: http://tinyurl.com/c45fn
Thank You