If you’re a beer fan, Ohio City smells like heaven on this sunny spring lunch hour. Great Lakes Brewing Co. is making a batch of Holy Moses White Ale, and the smell of coriander and warm oats fills the air. The brewery, founded in 1988, has become one of the city’s signature exporters over the past decade. The neighborhood’s intoxicating atmosphere is just one byproduct of a $7 million upgrade the brewery conducted last year.
“We couldn’t keep up with demand,” explains co-owner Pat Conway, (pictured at left) who founded and runs the brewery with his brother, Daniel. “The beer’s so well-received, it just flies off shelves and out of kegs at bars. So we had to expand.”
In 2010, Great Lakes Brewing Co. produced more than 100,000 barrels of beer, its best year to date, making it one of the country’s 25 largest craft breweries. It brewed at 100 percent capacity, running 24 hours a day, five days a week, and still couldn’t produce enough ale to fulfill orders. Last July, facing its busiest season, fall, the Conways reluctantly shut down the brewery for a month to boost the capacity of all their systems, from brewing to bottling.
“There was no good time to do it,” Conway says. “But if we didn’t do it all at once, it would have been that much more painful. The good news is we have better brewing equipment.”
The systems upgrade was conducted with the company’s environment-friendly mission in mind. For instance, the new bottling machine is twice as fast as its predecessor, filling as many as 240 bottles a minute. Before the machine fills bottles with beer, it rinses them with water. In an innovative twist, the machine captures the rinse water and instantly recycles it to cool itself.
“Rather than buy water three times, we use it three times,” says Saul Kliorys, the company’s environmental programs manager. “We save a million gallons a year.”
But the most dramatic improvement was to the company’s brewing system, designed and installed by the German company Huppmann, an industry leader that has a long history with Great Lakes.
Across the street from the restaurant, on the brewery’s second floor, the brewhouse is home to four massive, gleaming steel-jacketed tanks, each one a chamber of Great Lakes Brewing Co.’s heart, each representing one step of the brewing process.
Beneath the second-floor brewing command center, the tanks were cut open and expanded, increasing their capacity more than 10 percent, to 85 barrels a batch. Before the upgrade, the brewers could make five different batches a day. Now, they can produce 8 1/2 bigger batches every 24 hours.
After the beer is brewed and before it’s bottled, it now passes through a new centrifuge that has tripled the system’s capacity in the fermenting stage, allowing brewers to remove yeast from brewing beer at a rate of up to 55 gallons a minute — a marked increase from the previous 15-to-20-gallon limit. Like the bottling machine, the new centrifuge minimizes waste. Great Lakes used to dump the yeast, even though 80 percent of that slurry was, in theory, usable beer. Now they filter it. That change alone should create around 1,400 additional barrels per year.
“Before, that was all waste product,” Kliorys says. “We were sending it to the sewer. Now we’re making more product, using the same resources.”
Thanks to the renovations, Great Lakes is poised to increase its production in the next two years, from 100,000 barrels to a peak capacity between 150,000 and 175,000 barrels. For Great Lakes fans in 12 states, the increased output will literally be a Christmas present.
The brewery’s signature Christmas Ale is its No. 2 seller, even though it’s only available two months a year. It flies off shelves faster than Santa’s reindeer move house to house. Demand far exceeds supply. This year, the Conways project they’ll brew around 23,000 barrels of Christmas Ale, up from 16,000 in 2009.
Conway thinks the eco-friendly systems upgrade wasn’t just a good move for the business; it was the right kind of
improvement.
“The success of the brewery is way beyond the high-quality beer,” Conway says. “It’s the staff, the people, the packaging, the philosophy. It’s touching the hearts of the consumers who want to help support a company like ours.”