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Redhook Brewery
An interesting team outing, to put it mildly!
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For our Christmas Outing at work, Reid, our manager surprised all of us with a suggestion that we head out to Red Hook Brewery, in Woodinville, and take the tour they have, and eat at the brew house's pub... We jumped at the opportunity! |
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When you arrive, you realize you're very near "Beer heaven"... Red Hook is a local brewery that started as a microbrew, but is now nation-wide... well, 48 states. Oklahoma and Utah have a 3.2% limit, so Red Hook decided to not sell in those states. |
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The brewery started out in an old machine shop in Seattle's Ballard
District... Its first few attempts weren't exactly widely accepted,
but they sold enough to keep the company going. Their "Ballard Bitter" finally got the brewery going strong, and they moved to the Freemont District. |
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Red Hook cut a deal with Anheuser-Busch, offering Busch 25% of the profits to handle the distribution... in less than 3 months, Red Hook went from 7 States to 48... They quickly outgrew the Freemont Building, and build the one they're in now, in Woodinville... They also built a mirror one in New Hampshire, to handle eastern distribution. |
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Once inside the brew house pub, you get the feeling you're on sacred
soil...
Like most folks from the Pacific Northwest, I enjoy a good micro brew over the "national" labels... Red Hook is one of the more popular ones in the area. |
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Not long after arriving, the tour began. It was a quick walk down a hall, and up a flight of stairs to... |
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Nigel was our tour guide... he quickly let us know that Red Hook would be a good company to work for! After our first sample, he went about telling us how beer is made... |
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Barley, hops, sugar, and yeast... any more ingredients, and you
can't call it an "Ale".
His description of the process and the company history was quite interesting, but then again, he was talking about beer, so I guess it was pretty easy to be interesting! |
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| These vats is where the beer is brewed... like tea, the water temperature is brought to near boiling, and the roasted barley and sugar is added. After it has brewed "enough", its moved to another vat where the Hops are added. The more hops, the more bitter the beer, the less, the sweeter. |
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Computers monitor and control the whole process, but Red Hook brew masters make the decision of when to send the brew to the distillery room. |
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Each one of these tanks hold barrels of beer... but a barrel of beer
is 200 kegs! If a person were to drink 4 pints a day, it would take 17 years to empty only one of these tanks! And, these are the small ones... the ones on the outside of the plant are 4 times as large! |
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Yeast consumes the sugar in the brew, and its waste product is
alcohol, and carbon dioxide... which is what its all about! After it has fermented "long enough" 3-5 weeks, the beer is cooled to 32 degrees, and filtered, then it gets sent off to the bottling room. |
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At the first station, the crates of empty bottles are separated into
individual boxes supplied by a vendor in Oregon.
Red Hook prides itself in the fact that it only uses recycled glass and cardboard in its process. |
| The bottles are separated from the boxes. The boxes are moved to the loading station while bottles end up on the ramp going over the belt... |
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which takes them through the "Bottleneck", aranging them into single file... |
| ...so they can be placed in the washer... |
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...from which they enter the filling station. Before filling, the bottles are compressed with CO2, so ensure they are pressure-worthy, and to remove any oxygen that would cause impurities in the beer... |
| ...the bottles are then crowned. Crowning is the same as capping, but cola is capped while beer is crowned - see the amazing things that beer can teach you? Once crowned, the bottles are checked to ensure proper filling... Nigel didn't know - or wouldn't admit to - what happened to the bottles that weren't quite full... |
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...the full bottles are rejoined with their boxes, and prepared for movement to the distribution center... |
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...the ramp carries the bottles over to the distribution building,
and 500 gallons of beer a minute piggybacks through a pipe on the ramp, heading
over to the kegging station. The tour was informative, and once we got done, we went back and had "desert"... another sampling of beer. |
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Nigel enjoys answering cell phone calls during the tour... he was
pretty funny, actually! All of us did a group photo... here's S&M Systems, at their best... |
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I wouldn't mind working here at all! |
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Back at the Pub, we sat down to get some food...
Beer is part of our American Heritage... Benjamin Franklin obviously enjoyed it... but then again, he was neighbors with Sam Adams. |
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The appetizers were great! |
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Our team at its best... |
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we had a pretty good time... After dinner, we sat around and... talked. |
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We all had a great time... but some of us had more fun than others... |
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