More Photos from the MillerCoors Facility

One of the six brew kettles in Miller’s Milwaukee brewery is shown with the wort — the liquid extracted from the mashing process — in full rolling boil. Boiling in the kettle serves to sterilize the wort as well as remove volatile compounds which could impact on finished beer flavor, aroma and taste.

Sophisticated fill level detection units are used to inspect every package exiting a filler, units with fill volumes below allowable limits are automatically rejected.

A lauter tun is used to filter out the sweet liquid wort from the malted barley slurry, rakes in the lauter tun turn to keep the grain bed from compacting so maximum wort retrieval can be achieved.

A wort sample is pulled from the lauter tun and used to confirm full starch to sugar conversion of the malted barley.

A simplified schematic on the brew house wall shows the basic process flow from malt mill to mash tun to lauter tun to brew kettle to yeast addition followed by fermentation, aging and packaging.

Samples are routinely pulled and analyzed in various quality laboratories to measure numerous product and packaging attributes or characteristics.

One piece of lab equipment used is a TPO (Total Package Oxygen) analyzer that is used to measure the oxygen content in finished bottles or cans of beer. Lower TPO values are one way to positively affect beer sensory quality over the entire shelf life.