A visit to Heineken's Murphys brewery

As someone who takes my Continuing Professional Development very seriously it was without hesitation that I booked on to the IBD Study Tour of Ireland. We started in Cork, a city I liked the look of:

Connolly was a Wobbly too and the influence of the IWW could still be seen on the side of the building...

... along with some nationalist drivel.

But on to the studying. The first stop on the tour was Murphys brewery. The brewery dates from 1854 when a distilling family bought a hospital and converted it to a brewery. The company was bought by Heineken in 1983. 

It can be a difficult task getting into breweries owned by large companies and they can be restrictive on what you are allowed to see. In this case for Health and Safety reasons we couldn't get in the brewhouse which was a shame. They can do 12 six tonne brews a day in it in two lauter tuns. Heineken, Coors, Fosters, Tiger, Moretti, Lagunitas, Murphys and Beamish are brewed there, the stouts being perhaps four brews out of a weekly 35-40. Cider is also made there from sugar and concentrate.

They can mash every two hours and ten minutes, lautering takes three house. They have a holding vessel between the lauters and the copper, and unusually the yeast propagation plant is in the Hauppmann brewhouse. Overall extract losses are less than 7%.

They have heat recovery on the stack on the copper and a heat recovery tank holds hot water which is used to pre-heat the wort via a Plate Heat Exchanger. They have four 120 tonne malt silos and two wheat malt silos (though it's used at less than 5% so presumably they're smaller). Chocolate malt and roast barley are used for the stouts (Murphys and Beamish respectively) and colour adjustment. Maize goes in the Moretti. They have CO2 recovery and are self sufficient in it. They used to do a lot of filling of gas bottles do but not only do a small about of 20L gas containers. 

Heineken has a mashing profile 55, 64 and 78°C and is brewed at 17°P to 7.5% ABV before being cut to a sales strength of 4.3%. I'm also got something down about them mashing at 60°C not 55. For the stouts maybe? It's to prevent ferulic acid formation so they don't get a phenolic taste from 4 Vinyl Guaiacol. Mash pH is 5.5-5.7 and copper pH 5.3-5.5. Calcium carbonate is added in the Mash Conversion Vessel and phosphoric acid in the copper. 

Their 20 head keg filler can fill 850 x 30L kegs an hour. 

Maximum brew length is 330hl. Six brews of Heineken will go in a single Fermenting Vessel. Horizontal FVs have to be used for Heineken as they only allow a maximum height of 4m so they get the right ester profile in the beer. Wort is oxygenated to 20ppm. Fermentation is at 12°C for 10 days and it takes 28 days in total to make Heineken. Cider takes three weeks and stouts are filtered after 10 days. The stouts are carbonated to 1.5-1.8 volumes of CO2 in tank and nitrogenated just before packaging.  

Pentair cross flow filters are used and for lagers (but not stouts) PVPP is used for stabilisation. Total production is one million hl a year, at a push they could do 1.2 million.