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.