A visit to Augustiner brewery

Having been on a few brewery study tours I've noticed it's always an unexpected brewery that turns out to be my favourite. And so it was this time. Augustiner brewery, which I know beer geeks rave about, was the only one I'd heard of. Or so I thought. But in fact we were going to the Augistiner brewery in Salzburg, not the Augustiner brewery in Munich. So I really had no idea, but I'm pleased to say it was glorious!

The Augustinian bit is due to the monks (or I think more accurately friars). The Head Brewer said a monk is the boss. I don't know how much non-Trappist orders are involved in brewing. Living in a proddy country probably doesn't help, though we do have a Trappist brewery in Britain now. I once visited Buckfast Abbey, home of the tonic wine beloved by Glaswegian alcoholics, and was surprised to see several beers for sale that certainly appeared to be brewed by different religious orders. And I don't know how strict Augustinians are about beer made in their name, but I suspect less so than Trappists, who split away from a strict order for not being strict enough. But enough religious twaddle, it's not like their differences will be as interesting and important as say, those between Chalcedonianism and Nestorianism.

The brewery was like catnip to me, being gleaming copper and old techniques. The brewery dates from 1621. It makes 27,000hl a year, so small regional brewery in size and their bräustüberl (brewery tap) is immense.

The brewhouse

They have a gleaming copper two vessel 90hl brewhouse. Amazingly it's from 2012, so this brewery is not a working museum, they're actively keeping it like how it has been. They do double decoction, with a temperature profile 60-64-74-78°C, not the most traditional one so I guess the malt's fairly well modified. Brewing is from 5am to 4pm, with eight hour shifts.

The still use a coolship. This isn't new, dates from 1907. No gleaming copper though, it's made of mild steel. Temperature here drops from 100°C to 40-50°C in, my notes say, 30 minutes. A lot of evaporation happens here. The beer gets stronger and darker and trub drops out. The coolship is cleaned by hand every day. 

The mild steel coolship

But the coolship's not enough so they've got Baudelot coolers, vertical copper coolers that look like radiators and sound like they belong in a knocking shop. Cold water flows inside and hot wort runs down the outside. The Head Brewer got a bit cagey about answering questions about temperatures at this point. I'm not sure why, it's not like anyone is going to copy what they do. There's two sections. The top has river water flowing through it and the bottom section chilled water. I think the water's at 10°C in the upper section, 1°C in the lower. The are cleaned four times a day, before and after each use. 

Baudelot coolers

They have open fermenters, with the pitching temperature less than 10°C and lagering at less than 4°C. Fermentaion lasts for a week. Yeast is used ten times and is acid washed to kill bacteria, which given all the open equipment in this brewery is probably for the best. Lagering is carried out in 16 x 320hl tanks.

They have a plate and frame filter that dates from 1890:

Antique plate and frame filter

And slightly incongruously a centrifuge for the beer going to cask. 

Centrifuge

Yes, you did read that right. Cask beer! The draught beer here comes in pitch lined wooden casks, served as god intended without extraneous CO2. The pitch is something tree resin based that lines the casks so the beer doesn't come into contact with the wood. I did try taking a picture inside a cask but didn't manage it. I guess the yellow crap around the shive hole is pitch though. They have a cask population of 2,200 casks (25, 50 and 100L) and re-pitch them 4-5 times a year. Apparently it affects the taste but I can't say I noticed anything. 

Shive hole with pitch?

They have a 7,000 bpa bottling line they run once or twice a week, and of course a Profipack robot for loading and unloading crates. The bottled beer has a two month best before date!

We had the traditional find a victim to tap the cask, but all went well.

The beer was served in earthenware mugs so don't know what it looked like. Nice view from the window though.

The view from Augustiner Salzburg

They only close four days a year (two days as xmas and two at new year), which is handy as I was so impressed with this place I'd love to come back and drink more of the beer. 

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 300l 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. 

A visit to Lost and Grounded brewery

I dithered a bit over this CIBD event. Bristol's a bit of a trek and the schedule was Lost and Grounded 1-5pm, then Unwin's brewery 5-10pm, which looked like an excessive amount of time to spend in breweries if you're driving. I looked into getting trains, which would have allowed me to make better use of my drinking time, but they're slow and expensive. I wanted to catch up with people though, and it's always good to visit breweries, so I decided I'd just have to drive. 

Founded in 2016 Lost and Grounded are approaching their tenth anniversary. Output is currently 20,000hl per year, with brewing taking place five days a week.

Taking the German brewing tradition as their main inspiration, they still have the original 25hl Steinecker brewhouse from Krones. The base malt is pilsner malt from Dingeman's in Belgium. We were told Belgian and German maltsters have a different philosophy to British. Which I think means they under modify malt instead of doing their job properly. 

Steinecker brewhouse

It certainly looks that way with the stepped mash temperatures of 52, 62, 67, 72 and 78°C (these steps are for: protein breakdown, beta amylase, alpha amylase, ensuring all starch degraded, denaturing enzymes and speeding up wort separation). The can do decoction mashing as well, but this has to be controlled manually so they only do it for specials. The malt is delivered to an external 30t silo and crushed by a two roller mill.

With the addition of a holding tank after the lauter tun three years ago they've expanded from a three vessel system (mash conversion vessel, lauter tun, whirlpool/kettle with an external wort boiler) to four. The extra vessel means the start the next brew after less than three hours, compared to waiting four hours and 15 minutes before they had it. The first brew starting automatically at 2am (the brewer gets in at 6am!) they can do six brews a day. 

Heat recovery from kettle

The boil is intense for the first 20 minutes, eased off for 20 minutes, and then intense again for 20 minutes, which reduces the thermal load on the wort so less aldehydes are produced. I'm not really up on wort thermal load so I'll have to look into this. The have vapour heat recovery from the kettle stack via a plate heat exchanger, which provides 500L of hot water for the hot liquor tank. The use three hop additions. For the lagers Magnum as a bittering hop at the start of the boil, Perle in the middle and late 5kg of Hallertauer Mittelfrüh for the Keller Pils and 2.5kg Tettnang for the Helles. The kellelr pils has a a bitterness of 30 IBU. Classic American hops like Citra are used for the US style beers. It did make me feel old hearing Citra described as a classic hop! For the IPAs there is a hop addition at whirlpooling. 

Lactobacillus tank

In keeping with their Germanic ways they adjust mash pH for the lagers with 50L of a culture of Lactobacillus grown in wort. This adds more character than just using commercial acid, which is what brewers not bound by the German beer purity law normally do. And indeed it's what Lost and Grounded do for their ales, as the IBC of Murphy's AMS (a mixture of hydrochloric and sulphuric acid) opposite the culture tank testified.

The Lactobacillus is grown in a tank held at 48°C and 5hl of wort goes from  pH 5.5 to 3 in 36 hours. It's a very hop sensitive strain, and is used on the hot side of the brewery, so they've not had any problems with it infecting beer. Surprisingly though they have had problems with wild yeast infecting the Lactobacillus culture. I'd never heard of yeast growing at that high a temperature before. They have been able to solve yeast infections by heating the tank to 54°C and recirculating for 20 minutes.

Two head keg filler

About 85% of beer goes into keg. The keg filler is only two head to is run pretty constantly during working hours, with beers going into 30 and 50L kegs. 

Snazzy keg lifter

They have a snazzy keg lifter that can also invert kegs. 

For small pack they have a 10 head linear can filler, though only five of the heads were being used in the packaging run when we were there. 

Canning line

The fermenting vessels go up to 150hl. Lagers are pitched at 8°C, midway through fermentation temperature is raised to 10°C and they have a warm rest at 13°C to help get rid of diacetyl. Total fermentation time is 10 days. 

Lots of tanks

The beers are then cooled to 4°C for five days before the temperature is dropped to 0°C. The helles is largered for three weeks and the keller pils for four. We tasted the keller pils at two weeks and four weeks maturation and the older beer had lost the harsh, sulphur note of the younger version. Yeast is dumped every other day during lagering. For dry hopped ales 50% of the dry hopping comes from Spectrum hop extract, which doesn't cause hop creep (when enzymes in hops cause further fermentation by breaking down dextrins to sugars). Their beers are not filtered.

The house lager yeast strain is W34/70. They propagate in house, but skip the lab stage so start with a 500ml culture from White Labs in Copenhagen going into 5hl of wort. The lag phase is 12-16 hours then cell numbers double every three hours, starting at 2-3 million cells per ml and reaching 100 million cells per ml after 36 hours. For lagers the 5hl is pitched into 25hl before stepping up to 100hl, for ales 5hl goes into 50hl. Propagation brewer are blended into 125hl of normal brews. 

Yeast propagation vessel

The have CO2 recovery equipment from Dalum they got second hand from Brixton brewery after Heineken closed it. As it was only a few years ago the first small brewery in Britain got CO2 recovery I was surprised there are four breweries just in Bristol with Dalum equipment. Lost and Grounded still have to buy in some of their CO2 but deliveries are now every six to eight weeks instead of every two. The hope to get more CO2 recovery in the future, but having CO2 delivered also provides a useful backup.

Dalum CO2 recovery

They aim to make lagers with character, not too refined but not rustic either. As someone who seldom suckles at the devil's drainpipe out of choice I have to say their lagers are decent. Drinkers of the heathen persuasion could do far worse.

After Lost and Grounded I went on to Unwin's, which looked like it was  part of Bristol's take on the Bermondsey beer mile. The whole driving thing didn't really go with spending more time in a bar though so I didn't stay long. 

Unwin's brewery