By ROGER FILLION
Scripps Howard News Service
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
For Todd Hansen and a half-dozen others here, drinking beer in the afternoon is a vital part of the job.
But it's way more involved than simply kicking back each day and popping open some cold ones.
Call it hands-on quality control.
Hansen and a select group of Anheuser-Busch employees taste each ingredient that goes into making the beer, plus whatever else might sway quality. They do it daily.
"Absolutely everything that touches the brewing process will get tasted," said Hansen, resident brewmaster at the Anheuser- Busch Inc. brewery here.
The members of the "taste panel" sip "teas" brewed from rice and beechwood chips to make sure the ingredients are up to snuff. They chew on grains of barley malt.
The taste panel also samples the water that goes into the beer. That includes the water the city of Fort Collins pumps to the brewery. And it includes the water that's carbon-filtered at the brewery. That water is then used at every step of brewing.
And the tasters sample the beer at various stages of production. That includes: "alpha" beer that's undergone primary fermentation; "lager" beer aged for 21 days in beechwood chips; finished beer ready for packaging; and bottles ready for quaffing.
The tasters even sample the air that transfers the grain through the brewery's automated grain-handling system. They want to make sure that air doesn't influence the beer's taste. So they bubble it through water and sip the water.
The tasting amounts to quality control that goes beyond reading lab data about the beer's chemical makeup.
"Is it tasting the way we want it to? That's what it comes down to," Hansen said.
The brewery here is Anheuser-Busch's eighth largest. It produces some 24 brands and 9 million barrels annually. All beers and ingredients are sampled.
The daily tastings get repeated at Anheuser-Busch's 11 other U.S. breweries. At Anheuser-Busch corporate in St. Louis, a panel samples packaged beers produced from the 12 breweries. Daily.
"They're kind of a corporate cross-check to make sure the plants are uniform," said Hansen.
On a sunny March day, about 100 bottles sat neatly arranged on the granite counter that snakes around three sides of the room.
They contained, among other things, Fort Collins city water, beer at various stages of production, and bottles of Bud, Bud Light and a new handcrafted wheat beer.
Small metal trays containing rice, corn grits and two types of barley malt -- all pulled from the brewery's grain silo -- rested on the counter, at the front of the line of bottles.
"It starts with this: Mother Nature," explained Steve Presley, senior assistant brewmaster.
To start the process, Presley poured the contents of the bottles into dozens of glasses.
Jeff Jenkins, group manager at the brewery, swirled the water inside one glass.
"You're looking to coat a little bit (of the glass) just to see if you can pick up an aroma," he explained, inserting his nose into the glass.
No unwanted odors. "This is going to be a great water," said Jenkins.
Water is key.
The panelists look for a "clean" taste that won't affect the beer's taste.
Beginning their work, the tasters moved in a line, swirling the contents of each glass to get the aroma. They took a sip, enough to analyze the contents of the liquid to ensure there were no off or unwanted tastes.
"Like any manufacturing process, things go wrong sometimes," said Hansen, the brewmaster.
A power outage, for example, could produce a stuck valve. As a result, the sugar-rich amber liquid called "wort" could get left to boil too long in the brewkettle, a large vessel where hops are added.
To ensure the tasters keep their edge, the brewery sometimes slips something into the samples, such as a naturally produced aroma and flavor compound known as diacetyl. It has a buttered-popcorn aroma and taste. The Anheuser-Busch brewers want the taste to show up in the beer in a subtle way.
"Do we slip unknowns in there from time to time? Yeah. Just to check and keep everybody on their toes," Hansen said.
For the daily tasting panels, Hansen taps people from a pool of about 20. Skills are mainly learned on the job. But tasters also receive formal training to detect various tastes.
Because of genetics, people's taste buds vary.
"We all taste different," said Hansen. "There are people who are sharper at different taste characteristics than others."
And what's the desired effect the brewers are striving to deliver to a consumer tasting a bottle of Bud?
"Damn, that was good! I want another taste," Hansen said.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.net)
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