Sapporo's pilot brewery for new brewing technology.

Oda, M., Sahara, H. and Tamaki, T.

Abstract
Sapporo's beers are brewed at ten sites scattered over Japan. One of these, located at Shizuoka in the south of the country, includes not only a large scale brewery (brewhouse capacity 1000 hl/brew) for the company's mainstream beer brands but also two microbreweries with brewhouse outputs of 50 and 4 hl/brew respectively. The larger microbrewery is mainly used for the production of low volume speciality beers, while the small one serves as a pilot plant for testing new brewing materials and methods and developing new brand recipes. The pilot brewery's equipment includes a pair of vessels for decoction mashing, a lauter tun, a wort copper, a whirlpool, a wort cooler, twelve 4 hl fermenters, four 3 hl and four 1.6 hl maturing tanks, about ninety 30 litre fermenting/maturing tanks, a kieselguhr filter (30 litres/hour) and a bottle filler. For very small scale trials there is an extra set of brewhouse equipment with an output of 40 litres/brew.
Keywords : brewery equipment microbrewing pilot plant