Budweiser Factory Tour

This Sunday, Ryan and I decided we needed to get away from the house. We've spent so many weekends trying to fix it up, we thought it would be nice to take a break and go into the city. If the weather had cooperated, we might have gone to the botanical gardens or the zoo, but instead, a layer of snow had fallen over the tulips and daffodils on Saturday night. We decided to opt for an indoor activity. I had never been to the Budweiser factory tour, and had been wanting to do it for quite some time. Anyone who knows me knows I don't really like the taste of beer (and on the rare occassions I do drink beer, I certainly wouldn't choose the watery Budweiser), but like Ryan, I have a natural fascination with how things are made -- especially on the scale of operations that Budweiser operates. It was a quick one hour tour and didn't go into much depth, but it was still an interesting way to spend an afternoon.

	This is the beechwood that's added to each of the tanks of beer. The beechwood is thoroughly cleaned before each use, so it doesn't add any taste to the beer. Instead, it offers extended surface area for the yeast to attach to, which is what allows the fermenting process to last the whole 21 days the beer sits in the tanks. Without the beechwood, apparently the yeast would just sit in the bottom of the tank and not really reproduce, and not ferment the beer like it should.
	These are the massive tanks that hold the beer while it's fermenting. They're stacked several high. The volume of beer in that building is overwhelming. (I think they said something like if you drank a bottle of beer every hour, it would take something like 137 years to drain one tank.)
	This is the building where the ingredients are mixed together and strained.
	The mashing tanks are where the ingredients are mixed together.
	Ryan standing in the middle of the campus.
	Ryan standing in front of the bottling lines in the packaging building.
	This is one of many bottling lines.
	More of the packaging lines.
	Last but not lot least, we got to view the Clydesdale horses in their stall. (They are VERY well cared for! If only I lived so well.)

A couple of the interesting facts of the tour: they filter their own water at every plant around the country, to prevent beer produced in different areas tasting differently because of the different ingredients in the water. I never really thought about how helpful it was that the plant was along the Mississippi River, but when you see the volume of water that's needed to produce all the beer, you realize just how great a location it is! Also, they source their rice from Arkansas and their beechwood from Kentucky, Tennesse, and other nearby states. It was neat to know so many of the ingredients were sourced (relatively) locally.