A visit to Trumer brewery

The Trumer brewery was the next stop on the study tour. I'd prepared for this visit by having a few pints (half litres probably) of Trumer Pils the day before the tour started in, of all things, an Irish pub in Vienna. It wasn't a place I would have picked myself, but my colleague who's more clued up on Austrian beer had it on his list and it was dead good. The beer was good too, very clean and easy drinking. The brewery dates from 1601 and has been owned by the Sigl family for 250 years. They're now on to their eighth Josef Sigl as boss!

Annual production at Trumer is 80,000hl, spread over seven brands though the focus is pilsner. The European (Austrian and German?) Beer Sommeliers started at Trumer, with the aim of getting more of that wine language into beer. It seems to be doing better than the British version, which I think recently had its second re-launch. 

The old 100hl brewhouse was built in 1910 and used until the 80s. The kettle was directly heated with coal. Apparenty it could  still be used, but they're not going to because why would they?

The new two vessel 240hl brewhouse was built by Huppmann in 1985. Raw materials come from Austria and Bavaria, including hops from Hallertau and north Austria. Four tonnes of malt are used and hops are added in four stages. The have their own wells in the village and blend 70% well water (3 presumably German degrees of hardness) with reverse osmosis treated water. 

They have a six roller mill from 1965 and use the Kubessa method when brewing. Named after the brewer from Cologne that patented it in 1903, in the Kubessa method the husk is separated from the endosperm during milling. It is not added to the Mash Conversion Vessel during the early stages of mashing, only being added prior to lautering so it can help with wort separation. It means less husk polyphenols get in the beer. It's said to make a beer taste more elegant, and certainly the Trumer Pils in Vienna was very smooth. We had John Brauer, EBC grand fromage, explain to us on the coach that in fact little difference can be detected in fresh beer, but the Kubessa method give greater flavour stability so its advantages become more apparent over time. 

They have one shift brewing Monday to Wednesday, with typically two and half brews required to fill an FV. The minimum brewlength is 100hl. The fermentation block dates from 2006. 

Top view

Sales are slowly rising and they've left room for expansion.

Bottom view

They have branched  out into other products though, and also make oat milk. For the Pils they have open fermenters.

This allows them to skim off the dirty head (brandhefe) at the end of fermentation which helps with the clean taste of the Pils. Fermentation is for a week with at least four weeks of maturation. They don't measure diacetyl but do have a two day warm rest at 14°C. They are Slow Brewing certified, which is guess is related to the Slow Food movement. 

Total beer storage capacity is 10,000hl. They propagate and harvest the yeast. An ale yeast is used for a seasonal beer. 65% of the beer is packaged into keg by a 460 keg per hour filler according to my notes. It sounds a lot, but the breweries we'd been round did have flashy packaging equipment. The other 35% of the beer is bottled. They use perlite and cellulose for filtration and the beer is not pasteurised.

Storks on top of an brewery old chimney

Nice brewery , but I must confess though that the bottled beer we were given to drink weren't as good as the draught I'd had in Vienna. The carbonation on the Pils was much higher which gave it a harsher taste. It probably didn't help that we were drinking straight from the bottle. So, a rare example of me recommending a keg beer. But fear not, I was in Austria and they have different brewing traditions there so my immortal soul is not at risk.

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.