Denver, Colorado - Budweiser Brewery Tour

Hope everyone had a happy Easter weekend!  For the weekend, the family travelled out to the Rocky Mountain state, Colorado.  My lame, boring Uncle Dan, cool Aunt Michelle, and badass cousins Daniel and Michael live out there, and were nice enough to invite us out for a few days.

On our first day there, my Uncle Dan scheduled a tour for us at the Budweiser brewery out in Fort Collins.  As you probably know, Fort Collins is also home to craft breweries like New Belgium and Odell's, along with Anhueser-Busch (InBev), so this is a town that really has it all when it comes to beer.  Why, you ask, didn't we visit a craft brewery instead of the elephant in the room?  Well, there is only so much time in a day, and... it's important to understand the big corporate rice brewing enemies from the inside.  Friends close, enemies closer.  Intelligence gathering...if you will.  Here are a few photos from the tour:

We started things off with an opportunity to meet one of the Budweiser Clydesdales.  This big fella, Ralph, is a young buck in training.  If you've never seen a Clydesdale in person, these things are massive.  They are like, dinosaur/horse hybrids.   Huge!  But Ralph was a gentle giant, he was loving the attention, and particularly liked getting scratched around the ear.

After our visit with Ralph, we walked across a few large fields.  Along the way, we came across a little patch of hops.  These particular plants were Cascade hops, only about 2 weeks old and not yet climbing the ropes that were set up around them.  I was surprised to learn that Budweiser actually uses Cascades in some of their brews, although it is in relatively small amounts.

This photo is from a high vantage point - the tanks shown are mash tuns, only the top is visible here but each tank goes about 20 feet under ground.  They are massive.  

This one came out a little fuzzy, but that's probably a good thing.   The big hairy fat one in this photo is ME, standing in front of one of the lauter tuns in the same room that is pictured above.

This is a one of the fermentation tanks.  When we walked into this room, I did a double-take.  Actually I did about 5 double-takes.  These fermentation tanks are insanely massive, difficult to describe, but the picture below helps put it into perspective.

Budweiser ferments their beer in spaceships.  This fermentation tank probably has its own gravitational field.

A small snapshot of the largest room in the brewery, the packaging room.  This particular part of the line was immediately after the pasteurizing machine, which heats up the canned beer to around 145degrees.  This kills off any remaining yeast in the can, which helps increase shelf life and allows the beer to be shipped and stay "fresh" at room temperature.  Interestingly, all of AB's beers are naturally carbonated.

The gentleman in this photo was our tour guide.  He did an OK job, but unfortunately I don't think he really wanted to be there.  But...check out this picture!  This is the "aging" room.  Each tank holds beer which is aged with beechwood chips.  This supposedly adds flavor to the beer, but more importantly, it helps to separate and clean out the yeast from the beer, thus improving the efficiency and speed of the filtration process.  Again, can best be described as massive.  This place was so big, people were driving little golf-cart-like vehicles to get around.

This was an awesome experience.  I'm not going to vouch for AB, or give them any credit for their beer, but I certainly have to give them credit for their efficiency and their ability to run a massive operation like this.  They pump out hundreds of thousands of barrels of beer each week, and most of the process is fully automated.  At any given time, this plant only has about 200 people working the ENTIRE facility.  It's impressive.  No wonder the little guys that brew the good stuff struggle to make it.....they're up against Goliath!