A visit to Uttendorf Vitzthum brewery

Next stop was Uttendorf Vitzthum brewery. It's in a part of Austria that used to be Bavaria so I was a little bit wary of the obligatory Profipack robot, I've heard what robots do in Germany.  This one is on the bottling line and stacks crates on pallets at up to 15,000 bottles per hour. 

Before starting the tour  though, we watched a video about the brewery first. There were a few errors in the stuff it had about brewing, but hey you can't expect marketing people to get such things right, and they'd provided us a beer to drink while the video played. 

The brewery has been owned by the same family since 1906. In 1980 they were producing 2,000hl but it's now 25,000hl and 5,000hl in soft drinks. The brewhouse dates from 1981, bottling line from 1987, filtration from 2014 and tanks from 2019.

70% of their production goes into bottles, with 30% in keg, and 80% of sales are in a 30km radius. There had been an enticing picture of a wooden cask in the video but it was all a con:

The devil's work in Austria

10, 20 and 50L kegs are filled, but no beer served as god intended. For the small pack they have four different types of reusable bottles. The beers are filtered by a kieselguhr filter and cartridge filters down to one micron, but not pasteurised. They brew to the German beer purity law. Water comes from a 90m deep well and pellet hops are used. 

The 130hl kettle is directly fired using oil so it has a rummager, a copper chain dragged around the bottom, to prevent char burning on. The copper isn't pure so it also adds a bit of reinheitsgebot friendly zinc, which will keep the yeast happy!

Rummagers are something I'd only heard of previously in whisky pot stills. In the two vessel brewhouse the boil is for an hour. They do decoction mashes, starting at 60°C, with a triple decoction for the bock. 

They also have a Kaspar Schulz Schoko volatile stripper:

This was what I'd been missing at Ried brewery when the guy talked about their vessel for stripping DMS, as I couldn't quite work out what was going on. I turns out, like at Uttendorf, they have Schoko in a different room. But when I saw the distinctive mushroom shaped vessel I knew what was going on here. Mind you, they're not currently using it in Uttendorf.

The temperature for bottom fermented beers is 6°C, for the top fermented beers it's 16°C. Fermentation takes a week followed by lagering for 9-16 weeks, which sounds like the traditional one week per degree Plato. 

After the brewery it was into the yard where they had crates of beer waiting for us. I sampled a couple. Of bottles that is!

A visit to Ried brewery

The second day of our studying began at Ried brewery in Ried im Innkreis. The brewery was founded in 1906 and is owned by local pubs! Annual output is 45,000hl. The have a 300hl pilot brewery where they make things like IPA and honey beer. They also use it when doing beer sommelier courses. 

The pilot brewery

The main brewhouse has a 150hl capacity. 

Three vessel CIP set

They brew to the German beer purity law using mostly Bavarian malt and Austrian hops, with some hops coming from Hallertau. 

The brewhouse

For those of your concerned about danger of overheating due to the large window, as a brewer on the tour was, I checked with my compass and it's north facing. 

They have a brewhouse from Kaspar Schulz dating from 1986, which has a stripping vessel after the whirlpool with -7 mbar air pressure to remove DMS. They get 7% evaporation after 55 minutes in the kettle. Whirlpooling and stripping is 25 minutes, though maybe an hour by the time it's emptied. The wheat beers don't go through the stripper. 

The lauter tun

There was a Brewer's Star on the wall, which refers to alchemical or superstitious nonsense not religious nonsense. 

Another group of three vessels, another CIP set? Not this time, these are hop dosing vessels. 

The old brewhouse was built in 1934.

Checking my notes and pictures we seem to have missed out fermentation and maturation entirely at this brewery, but did spend a lot of time in their flash bottling hall. 

It will do 18,000 bottles an hour.

It of course includes a robot from Profipack.

They have reusable bottles so there's a bottle washer:

A crate washer:

Label debris from the bottle washer:

Bottles:

Crates:

We stopped for refreshments after the tour in the bräustüberl (brewery tap). I can't say I was disappointed the grey sausages ran out before I got to them, the brown sausages I had were fine. They looked like frankfurters to me, but having once caused outrage in Italy by incorrectly calling something salami I'm not taking any chances. 

There was a good range of beers. I was trying to pace myself but still managed to sample a few. The black beer (schwarzmann) was the winner for me.  

A visit to Ottakringer brewery

There was bad timing with the latest CIBD study tour. It came the week after a distilled spirits conference in Edinburgh so my liver was a bit tender before we even started. But it takes more than that to stop me, so I girded my loins and set off to Austria. 

First stop on the study tour was Ottakringer brewery in Vienna. It was founded in 1837. Annoyingly the annual volume is missing from my notes but I think it was 400,000hl. 

Cylindro-conical fermenters

This study tour had sponsorship from Profipack, which saved on the pennies but mean having one of their robots seemed to be a feature all breweries we visited had in common. The one at Ottakringer shifted kegs. 

Packaging at Ottakringer

A gas boiler provides the steam for the brewhouse, which had the look of an old family brewery about it. Which is exactly what it is. It's not fully automated having one brewer working per shift. 

The deionise their water and lower the mash pH using sauergut (wort acidified by lactic acid bacteria). Brews take 7-8 hours and use 7-8 tonnes of malt grist, which gets split between two lauter tuns. Wheat is used in the unfiltered beers, to get a bit of chill haze in them so they look the part. Most brews are around 14°P, slightly above sales gravity. 

A buffer tank after the lauters.

The mash profile is like an infusion mash at 65°C, rising to 75°C for when it goes to the lautering. The lauters have a capacity of 300hl each, the kettle 600hl. The kettle has a Stromboli boiler. 

The Mash Conversion Vessel is inside one of the old copper vessels on the higher level. I think it's stainless inside an old vessel though. 

There's a mash kettle at the back, but they won't be needing that with infusion mashes. 

There are three shifts of one person in the fermentation block, which dates from 1980. Only lager yeast is used, which they propogate, only using it for 3-5 generations.

There are 14 large tanks and 10 smaller. Unitanks aren't used, beer goes from fermentation to lagering tanks where it spents three weeks to two months. Fermentation is mainly at 12°C. There is a warm rest in lagering, before going to -1°C. I would guess that's before getting to the cross flow filter. I heard the diacetyl specification is <0.1 but if that's ppm it would make it the high level of 100ppb so maybe it's <0.01 or 10ppb. I certainly didn't taste any diacetyl when we got to the all important sampling part.