Photos: A tour inside Jax’s Anheuser-Busch Brewery
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Early in the brewing process, the mixture of water and grain (mash) is strained in the Lauter Tun. The result is a sweet, clear amber liquid called wort.
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The main ingredients used in the brewing process include barley, malt, yeast, rice, water and hops.
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A roof deck view of the 1.4 million square foot brewery’s operations. The brewery’s brewing capacity was 1.7 million barrels per year when it opened in 1969. Today, its brewing capacity is well over 9 million barrels a year, making it AB’s 3rd largest US brewery behind AB’s St. Louis and Houston locations.
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Since 1987, this on-site 8.6 megawatt natural gas plant has powered the brewery’s 24/7 operations.
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Many of the brewery’s raw materials are received by rail.
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An outside look at the brewery’s brew house. the 98-foot-tall brew house is the tallest building at the 205-acre industrial complex.
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To ensure consistency, every day at 3:00pm, every product produced in the brewery is sampled by staff. In this room batches of water, fermenters, chip beer, filtered beer and packaged beer are sampled.
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In addition, the brewery flies a sample of its product to St. Louis for a 3:00 pm quality control test by expert brew masters. Only samples deemed perfect are cleared for bottling. It’s the final step in a series of five separate quality control checks.
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A look inside the brewery’s operations center.