New Glarus Brewing Company (17.02.-01.03.) (1)

For the next two weeks, I will be going to the small village of New Glarus to work with the local brewery. I have been provided with a house and a pickup truck for this 😎. The community was named after the Swiss municipality of Glarus and was founded in 1845 by 150 immigrants from Glarus. As a result, many houses here look like those in Switzerland and there are many Swiss restaurants.

The brewery produces approximately 250,000 hectoliters of beer per year (+20,000 hectoliters of Riverside!) with a 120hl Krones brewhouse, making it the 25th largest brewery in the United States, even though they sell their beer 'Only in Wisconsin'. There is the old brewery in town ('Riverside Brewery') where the special varieties and sour/fruit beers are produced, and a brewery built in 2006 on a hill next to the town ('Hilltop Brewery') where the best-selling varieties are brewed, such as Lager, Pale Ale, Wheat Beer, and their flagship 'Spotted Cow', a highly drinkable ale. The new brewery is open-plan, allowing visitors to grab a beer and stroll through the brewery. The New Glarus Brewery is incredibly well-structured and looks wonderful! Even many German breweries could take a leaf out of their book!

For the first four days, I will be starting in the cellar, which includes the fermentation and storage cellar, filter cellar (centrifuge & CIP), bright beer tanks cellar, and parts of yeast propagation. I had extremely interesting conversations with the very good employees and working in such a well-organized operation is really fun. For example, Chad is moving to Berlin next year to do a kind of shortened English-speaking brewing master's training at the VLB. Hop stuffing was also very cool, where we threw a huge amount of hops into a 600hl cylindro-conical fermentation and storage tank. To counteract the oxidation that occurs as a result, the brewery krauses the beer with cow krausen. They also have open wheat beer fermentation vats from the Gresser company in Regensburg. I also got to participate in a centrifuge training course by the Westphalian company GEA 😉. The fermentation and storage time for the Cow is 2-3 weeks, while the remaining beers age for 4-5 weeks. Freshly propagated yeast is always used for this, sometimes even harvested yeast.