Brewery
[1] The commercial brewing of beer has taken place since at least 2500 BC;[2] in ancient Mesopotamia, brewers derived social sanction and divine protection from the goddess Ninkasi.
[3][4] Brewing was initially a cottage industry, with production taking place at home; by the ninth century, monasteries and farms would produce beer on a larger scale, selling the excess; and by the eleventh and twelfth centuries larger, dedicated breweries with eight to ten workers were being built.
[7] In some form, it can be traced back almost 5000 years to Mesopotamian writings describing daily rations of beer and bread to workers.
Early breweries typically used large copper vats in the brewhouse, and fermentation and packaging took place in lined wooden containers.
Such breweries were common until the Industrial Revolution, when better materials became available, and scientific advances led to a better understanding of the brewing process.
[11] A handful of major breakthroughs have led to the modern brewery and its ability to produce the same beer consistently.
The steam engine, vastly improved in 1775 by James Watt, brought automatic stirring mechanisms and pumps into the brewery.
The steam engine also allowed the brewer to make greater quantities of beer, as human power was no longer a limiting factor in moving and stirring.
The development of hydrometers and thermometers changed brewing by allowing the brewer more control of the process, and greater knowledge of the results.
Breweries today are made predominantly of stainless steel, although vessels often have a decorative copper cladding for a nostalgic look.
It imparts no flavour in beer, it reacts with very few chemicals, which means almost any cleaning solution can be used on it (concentrated chlorine [bleach] being a notable exception).
Today, modern brewing plants perform myriad analyses on their beers for quality control purposes.
Samples are pulled at almost every step and tested for [oxygen] content, unwanted microbial infections, and other beer-aging compounds.
Brewing is typically divided into 9 steps: milling, malting, mashing, lautering, boiling, fermenting, conditioning, filtering, and filling.
The boil lasts between 60 and 120 minutes, depending on its intensity, the hop addition schedule, and volume of wort the brewer expects to evaporate.
It is during this stage that fermentable sugars won from the malt (maltose, maltotriose, glucose, fructose and sucrose) are metabolized into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Fermentation tanks come in many shapes and sizes, from enormous cylindroconical vessels that can look like storage silos, to 20-litre (5 US gal) glass carboys used by homebrewers.
At this stage, especially if the beer is cooled to around freezing, most of the remaining live yeast cells will quickly become dormant and settle, along with the heavier protein chains, due simply to gravity and molecular dehydration.
An active yeast culture from an ongoing batch may be added to the next boil after a slight chilling in order to produce fresh and highly palatable beer in mass quantity.
In localities where a tax assessment is collected by government pursuant to local laws, any additional filtration may be done using an active filtering system, the filtered product finally passing into a calibrated vessel for measurement just after any cold conditioning and prior to final packaging where the beer is put into the containers for shipment or sale.
Kieselguhr, a fine powder of diatomaceous earth, can be introduced into the beer and circulated through screens to form a filtration bed.
They operate on a temporary or itinerant basis out of the facilities of another brewery, generally making "one-off" special occasion beers.
[18] Prominent examples include Pretty Things, Stillwater Artisanal Ales, Gunbarrel Brewing Company, Mikkeller, and Evil Twin.
In return for their financial support, the breweries were given concessions to sell beer to spectators and advertise their products in stadiums.
