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!