On Tuesday I went to the F.X. Matt brewery for a tour.  This brewery makes the Saranac line of beers and sodas, as well as some production for smaller microbrewers who need extra capacity for large runs.

Our guide took us first through some displays of the products produced by the brewery over the years, and also portraits of the four generations of the Matt family that have owned and run it, starting with Francis Xavier Matt who founded the business in 1888.  This portion of the tour included a visit to the prohibition room, which was essentially a Speak Easy, quietly serving alcoholic drinks during the prohibition period, with a peep hole in the door for asking the password, and an escape route out the back.  It’s my understanding that the brewery only officially produced soft drinks during this time, but within an hour of prohibition being repealed they had beer for sale, so you can draw your own conclusions!

The tour then took us through the production line of the brewery, and it was really refreshing to see that it was still very much a working factory, not made shiny and artificial for tourists.  The overall production follows the steps of brewing, fermenting, aging, and packaging.

A huge quantity of grain is delivered by rail and tanker trucks and stored in six four-storey silos by type.  I couldn’t really get a good picture of these because of their sheer size!

The mash cooker is the next step, where the grains start the process of becoming beer.

The liquid is drained and filtered, with the remaining solids being sold on as stock feed, while the liquid goes into the copper kettles.  Each of these holds about 6,500 cases of beer, and can be heated to boiling in about 15 minutes, which sounds pretty impressive!  I believe that the hops and other ingredients are added here.

It was quite hot in the cooking room, so was a bit of a relief to move into the fermenting room, where these four huge fermenters are where the magic happens, and the liquid becomes beer.  Additional hops or other ingredients may also be added at this stage.  Each fermenter has a capacity of 1640 BBLS — I looked that up, and it stands for ‘barrels,’ with a barrel generally defined as 42 US gallons, which is about 159 litres or 35 imperial gallons.  I’ll let you do the math.  That’s a lot of beer! 

Depending on the beer, it may spend some time in oak barrels after fermentation.  This area also held one of several ‘beer libraries,’ where a case of each production run ever made is kept.  If a distributor or consumer reports a problem, a beer from the library can be checked for any flaws that might have happened in production.

Aging comes next, and occurs in more tanks in a refrigerated room.  Walking next to these huge tanks, it was impossible to get a good photo of them, but I definitely knew I was in a working factory when I had to step over hoses and cables running between all the tanks!

The final step in production is packaging, which includes bottling, capping, labelling, and boxing.  There was a fire in this room about eight years ago that shut down production of soft drinks for several months, and of beer for nearly a year.  The owners used that as an opportunity to upgrade all of the bottling equipment, so that they now have quite a modern system with high throughput.

The tour ends back in the tavern, decorated as it would have been in 1888 when the brewery was founded.  At the start we were given two tickets each for free beers (or soft drinks), and we earned more along the way by correctly answering trivia questions.  I first tried the ‘Hoppy Hour Hero moe.saic IPA,’ which turned out to be quite good and rather lemony, but very strong!  I followed it with a Pumpkin Ale, which was more to my taste, being lightly spiced with, I think, cinnamon and nutmeg.

I still had to drive home, and was getting into some rather intense and interesting conversations at that point, so decided that I’d better not use my remaining tickets!  In the brewery shop you could pick up some really unique branded merchandise, as well as six packs or cases of your favorite drinks.  They also do a ‘trail mix,’ where you can mix and match six flavours of your own choice.

Overall, it was a great tour through the guts of a working brewery, and well worth the $5 entry fee.  I might have to go back for some of that Pumpkin Ale… that was pretty special… 🙂