if you haven’t already, see if you can get a copy of More Railroads You Can Model (red cover). One of the railroads depicted is the Milwaukee Road “Beer Line” that served a few breweries in Milwaukee.
I would imagine in the old days, CO2 may have been brought in as solid cakes (dry ice perhaps?) that would be dissolved in water to release the CO2.
But doesn’t beer get its fizz from the fermentation process?
AltonFan wrote:
“But doesn’t beer get its fizz from the fermentation process?”
JB says:
Well it does here at my home brewery and, for sure, also at Anheuser-Bush (according to “tangerine-jack”) Schell’s and Summit.
And thanks guys ( “bukwrm” and “tangerine-jack”), for the responce on the CO2 and how A-B goes about things!
Yes, the yeast that devour the sugars in the wort produce alcohol and co2 gas. Brewers allow the fermentation to run its course then home-brewers add some more sugar to the living yeast and confine the mixture in heavy glass bottles. The yeast grows and produce CO2 to carbonate the bottle. Sometimes the bottles explode because of to much pressure.
Exploding bottles are a bad thing for a commercial brewery. They don’t like heavy bottles much eather, they cost to much to move. So to eliminate the exploding bottles they filter the beer, the filter is fine enough to remove the yeast and the little CO2 that is in the unpressurized beer. Then the beer is chilled and pressurized with CO2 and bottled. No yeast means that the pressure inside the bottle will not rise and no bottles, even light thin ones will explode.
As I was typing this it dawned on me that there is no need to ship in CO2. The fermenting wort puts off huge amounts of it. All a brewery would need to do is harvest enough gas from this step in the process to pressurize the beer for bottling.
A highly compressed model brewery and supporting yard in 8 square feet of N scale modules:
http://www.modelrail.us/gallery/id27.html
bukwrm,
You may be right about tapping off CO2 from the fermentation for bottling, I don’t really know. That is an A-B trade secret that few are privy to, like the recipe for the beer itself. Imagine the black market price for that list of ingredients! All I know is how the hops move from the rails through the brewery to the market, but not a lot about what happens to the hops inside the “restricted areas”. I can assure you that the bottling room works 24/7 filling tens of thousands of bottles and cans per day. I may be off on the numbers a little, but I think the claim is 17,000 cases and 5,000 kegs per shift. From what I have seen with my own eyes, that may be very close. It’s an impressive operation, most impressive.
What staggers me is the realization that Williamsburg is only one brewery of many in the Anheiser-Bush inventory. Add in the other big name brewers, plus a multitude of smaller operations, and one begins to get the understanding that ALL this beer will be consumed within a week or so by the public. That is A LOT OF DRUNK SOB’S OUT THERE!!!
Thank you for sharing your project with me. Mine is a might bit smaller than yours in terms of operations. (Your N scale depicts a larger operation than what is planned on my HO scale layout) It has shown me that I am on the right track.
James
Might as well keep up the happy model train talk going.
The Reading Northern RR website has a couple photos of the Yuengling brewery at the bottom of this page…can see pipes and stuff in some of the photos. Hope this helps.
Mike
Check out this book. I think this book might help.
As a former home brewer what most amazes me is the way the commercial brewers get the same taste batch after batch after batch. The differences in the water from plant to plant, the variations in the grain, the hops. It is truly astounding that they can keep the same taste without using artificial flavoring agents and to the best of my knowledge none of them do.
As Ben Franklin said “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
I remember seeing provision for cardboard for boxes and packaging, but no in bounds for bottles, cans and returned or new kegs. Got to package that “production” into something for distribution! Got to move the necture of the Gods in something!!
Will
Earlier on, several people mentioned Coors. Just a few notes:
The main Coors brewery complex in Golden, CO is bigger than a lot of small towns.
Instead of turnouts, the reefer loading facility uses a long string of transfer tables to position cars for loading. Each transfer table is two tracks wide and just long enough to accept a reefer. The whole thing is under cover (it snows in Colorado!) but could be modeled in the open in a more temperate clime.
You might want to put some of your structures on the backdrop, either photos or low-profiles. That way you can have a really big brewery complex without devoting your entire layout to it.
when i have a question like this there’s only one thing to do…RAILFAN TIME!..go visit a brewery near your home, see what all is involved, take notes and pictures, once you have all this information, then plan your layout scene…chuck
Well you can imagine what I thought when I first saw this title[:D]. Sounds like you planned it out nicely. It will be a lot of switching. Of course we’ll want to see pics of it when it’s done.
Bukwrm,
A-B has a very high tech computerized central control and monitoring system that quality checks every aspect of production, nothing is left to chance. That is why the brewmeister is making the big $$$$, to get the beer the same flavor as corporate standard. The water is filtered and quality checked, and as I mentioned before, A-B owns it’s own hop farms so they have 100% control over the growth of primary ingredients. It is a huge and sophisticated operation, but they make millions every year so they can afford equipment and production techniques that a home brewer could only dream of.
BTW, I don’t have anything against Coors, I was just quoting what the Brewmeister said to me. A-B is only one of many fine breweries making a quality product.
Thanks for catching that oversight. I will have to adjust accordingly.
James
Originally posted by San Diego Coaster[/i]
Here is an overhead view of one Los Angeles area brewry: http://tinyurl.com/bbkvz
Thats the Irwindale Millers Brewery I described at the beginning of this topic off the old mainline, now branchline BNSF
Here is another: http://tinyurl.com/c45fn
Thats the Budweiser Brewery in Van Nuys off the UP mainline its mostly truck serviced
Vic[:p]
Just a few comments on the brewery you’re building…I was one of the start-up Engineers on the Miller Irwindale plant mentioned earlier on…there is also a small tank house, and high pressure gas storage tanks…the tank house is for unloading molasses…that’s right…it’s a major part of beer…the sugar reacts with the yeast to ferment the wort, create more yeast, which is pulled off for future brews and sold to stores as “Brewers yeast” and create CO2, which is pulled off and stored in the high pressure tanks, to be injected into the aged beer (non-carbonated at this point) under extreme pressure just prior to packaging…it then goes to the pasteurizers and finally the palletizers to be stacked and wrapped and finally shipped…the only products shipped cold are the “pony” kegs…tappers if you will, because they are not pasteurized…Coors HAD to ship cold, because none of their product was pastuerized…so the reefer traffic is minimal…also, the spent grain isn’t transported in hoppers…it’s augered out of the dump hoppers hot, right into open top trailers…this stuff will solidify if it cools, so cleaning the hoppers could be a major task…it’s also extremely abrasive, and the augers or screws in the Moyno pumps (dairy grade) are replaced frequently…anyway, that’s probably more then you wanted to know, but now you can have trucks to haul off the spent grain, tanker cars for molasses, boxes for the beer and a reefer of two for the cold products…Miller also sold off excess CO2 to fire protection companies and it left the plant in tank trucks and hi-pressure tank cars…one last thing…I know of no brewery that uses city water…Bud and Miller plants in Ca all sink deep wells…not just for the pure water, but the cost…MIller Irwindale is a 20 million bbl plant…at the time I was there, in the mid 70’s, a six pack of High Life cost about 6 cents to make, package and ship…thats after the CO2, yeast and spent grain is sold off…not bad…if you have any more questions, we can take it to em if you wish…
Other than rolling stock and motive power, I doubt it.
The brewery should offer you a lot of flexibility. I grew up not far from the HQ Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis. To this day, it still looks very old-fashioned. Brick and stone, vintage appearance (actually, very similar to the DPM modular walls with their brick “columns” at joints). There are more modern buildings, but they’re either constructed to look ‘historic’ or sort of tucked away out of sight.
On the other hand, I drive past a Miller brewery regularly which is very state of the art. Glass and steel, very modern looking, even to the point of having huge glass walls so you can see the boiling vats and equipment as you drive by (like what you often see at brewpubs, just on a huge scale).
That latter would likely be far too modern for a '69 era layout, but my point is that you can have anything from a 100% modern as-of-your-era building back to a very old-fashioned building from any time in the past and still be on target.
One final note: as a homebrewer myself, I’d suggest that hops is about the 1/10 ratio to barley as noted here… BY WEIGHT.
But by volume, it’s far less skewed. Hops are light while barley is very dense. So I’d suggest you’re looking at more of a 1/3 or 1/4 ratio of hops to barley if you consider it by volume of space needed - number of cars, storage, etc. - which is probably more relevant for MRR purposes.
And as also mentioned, your A#1 ingredient that dwarfs all else is water. If you haven’t a nearby source, you’d best determine that your brewery sits over an acquifer and has a big well with a large pump…
Thanks for sharing your insigts. I will work your information into my plans.
James