Brewing success

Modern alchemy is alive and well in Milwaukee’s Sprecher Brewing Company, where brewmasters turn water, malt and hops into liquid gold

by Tom Hammel

No matter where you live in the United States, if you appreciate beer or soda (that’s pop, to Iowans) you’ve probably heard of Sprecher beer or root beer. And if you haven’t yet, you will. From its first bottle in 1985, Sprecher Brewing Company has been brewing a reputation, one case at a time, as one of America’s premier small breweries.

And that reputation is indeed growing: Sprecher’s Bavarian Black beer was recently named one of America’s 10 best beers and Sprecher Root Beer was just named America’s only Four-Star rated root beer by Imbibe Magazine. And these are merely the latest awards earned by this company of just 50 people.

The irony of this story is that Sprecher’s growing national reputation for artisan beers has been made possible by sales of its nonalcoholic sodas. Root beer is by far Sprecher’s best selling product and its steadily growing popularity allows the company to produce its connoisseur beers and aged barley wines.

“Refreshing”
Brewing is a relatively simple process. Working with commercially available kits, amateur “brewmasters” can produce highly palatable home brews. But brewing on a commercial scale requires specialized equipment, artisan skill and a lot of stainless steel. For a young brewery, there are two ways to acquire that equipment; buy it new or buy it used.

If you plan to buy it used, you had better know what you are buying and how to make it work for your needs. Fortunately, Randy Sprecher’s years as a brewing supervisor gave him a keen eye for equipment, and his multiple degrees help him see engineering possibilities that others do not.

Most of the critical equipment in Sprecher’s 70,000-square foot facility — the brew kettles, storage tanks and bottling and packaging machines — came from other plants and industries. Sprecher’s bulk glass elevator, the machine that lifts pallets of new bottles up to feed into the plant’s single conveyor line, came from a Tropicana orange juice plant in Florida. The filling machine is a veteran of a Coca Cola plant. The labeling machine once labeled pickle jars and a package erector built cartons for Johnson Controls. The company’s stainless steel aging tanks came from a dairy. Much of Sprecher’s lab equipment, which tests recipes and quality control, came from the old Pabst Brewery right here in Milwaukee.

Some of this equipment needed very little work to be repurposed for Sprecher’s needs. Other machines, including the bulk glass elevator, took significant investment in both money and reengineering to reconfigure it for use in the plant. As Sprecher’s maintenance and production teams worked to install new equipment, they also studied it for operating quirks and potential weaknesses that could cause potential downtime after it was put into service.

Tag team maintenance
Eliminating potential problems before they occur is a major focus in the plant. Partly because all of Sprecher’s tanks, boilers, bottlers, conveyor systems, packaging machines, forklifts, mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems are maintained by a team of just two men. Tom Litzler has been maintenance manager since 1999. David McNamer is Tom’s maintenance mechanic. Accomplishing the range of tasks they must perform requires broad skill sets.

“I like my maintenance manager to be a master of at least three trades if not five, because I’ve done all that work myself in years past,” Sprecher explains. “Tom is superb with anything metal, wood, plastic, electrical, hydraulic — you name it. We do all we can in-house; drive lines, power distribution, even some of our PLCs.”

This leaves refrigeration, major electrical and some advanced motion control programming tasks for outside companies. Depending on his workload, Litzler will sometimes also use contractors for forklift maintenance. Everything else is done in-house.

With just 50 year-round employees and a maintenance staff of two, Litzler doesn’t see the need for a CMMS; instead, he and McNamer track critical repairs and projects on a job board in their workshop.

Having operators trained this way lets Litzler and McNamer focus more effectively on larger issues, such as critical line repairs and seasonal projects.

“Because we have just one line, my biggest concern is the critical equipment — the filler, the brew kettle and the labeler,” Litzler says.

To minimize recurring maintenance tasks, Sprecher works to build reliability and longevity into every component.

“With everything we put into the system, we try to use components that have very long life,” Sprecher says. “The seals and gaskets for tight-sealing bottles on the filling machine or kegs on the keg machine are unusually shaped and can get pretty expensive. We try to find ways to reproduce those gaskets ourselves out of the toughest material possible.”

Machine operators are trained to handle routine checks and lubrication on their equipment. When something beyond their ability comes up, they call in maintenance.

Cross-training also helps ensure that someone can step in and keep production flowing in case a worker is ill or whenever the need arises. This cross training also lets workers sample a variety of jobs. Since the company is small and workers know each other well, a family atmosphere pervades the business. The result is a very stable workforce. Employee turnover is rare; a worker is far more likely to move to another position in the plant than leave the company.

This family-style working environment, a shared passion for their products and a healthy profit sharing program, all help to keep employees in the fold.

Projects
Having maintenance-savvy operators also allow the maintenance team time to pursue major projects in the off-season. One of the plant’s most extensive installations was its bulk bottle handling system.

“Even though we made almost everything out of used equipment and added two upgrades of controls, it was still about a $200,000 venture,” Sprecher says.

The maintenance team was involved from the beginning of the project, helping reconfigure the major equipment for its new purpose in the plant, learning its vulnerabilities and trying to anticipate future sources of trouble.

“Most everything takes about a year of troubleshooting and debugging in small or large ways, but the whole system is working beautifully today,” Sprecher adds.

Other pieces have been improved since they were installed. Litzler and McNamer replaced the filler machine’s old chain drive with a belt drive for a smoother and quieter operation.

“Right now, we are trying to get more efficiency out of our machines by having our cardboard-box-making machine make a 9-pack cube,” Sprecher continues. “We have to address handling the  cardboard, gluing it up and transportation back to the case stacker when they are full. As the nine-pack gains marketplace acceptance, we need to be able to make them more efficiently.”

Local flavors
Sprecher also relies on local suppliers for both its bottles and packaging. Sprecher cartons are printed by Great Lakes Packaging. Bottles come from a St. Gobain plant in Burlington, Wisconsin. Many ingredients are local too, including Wisconsin honey, cranberries and cherries from Door County. Naturally, the origins of some ingredients are the brewmaster’s secret.

However, even though many ingredients and materials are made locally, they aren’t available at the touch of a speed-dial button. Sprecher’s sales and production teams meet weekly, but communicate daily, on new orders coming in from the field that could strain capacity or create shortages of bottles, packaging or ingredients.

“We have to order a lot of our ingredients ahead of time, including glass, malt, sugar, honey and vanilla,” explains Tom Bosch, production manager.

As Sprecher grows and more major orders come in from big box retailer, Bosch and his team must continually revise their projections.

Quenching the thirst
With root beer driving such a large chunk of Sprecher’s sales, the company devotes two to three days of production to it per week. Root beer concentrate, five times stronger than the final product, is held in a 10,000-gallon tank, which is continually replenished. From here, the concentrate goes into mixing tanks for dilution and “carbo” tanks for carbonization before going to either the keg filler or the bottle filler.

“Once we hit May 1, we don’t look back until the end of August,” Bosch says. “We push between 100 and 200 kegs of root beer out the door everyday in the summer.”

The keg filling station uses a two-valve clean and fill process. Empty kegs are cleaned and sanitized by valve, then filled by another. Kegs are cleaned and filled upside down to allow gravity to aid in the cleaning and rinsing process.

“We do 30 to 35 half-barrels an hour — that’s about two minutes per keg,” Bosch says. Each half-barrel holds 15.5 gallons. Filled kegs are then stacked on a pallet and taken to the warehouse and staged for shipping.

Handling growth
Success can bite those who aren’t careful. Sprecher’s growing popularity in big-box stores like Sam’s Club and Costco is the latest challenge to production scheduling, and there’s a day off from the company’s rigid quality controls. Developing that growth means adding production capacity.

“We currently have a multi-vessel brewhouse but we can only do either beer or soda at one time; we would like to do both simultaneously,” Sprecher says. “We’ll need to add more fermentation and storage tanks for beer production. That’s a big project that we want to get done this year.

“As we grow, we need our brewing and packaging capacities to keep up with demand. We don’t want to work our people around the clock, but we’re pretty close now!” he says and laughs.

Filled and capped 16-ounce bottles exit the scenically painted bottling room through the small window in the left center of the photo, then loop around on their way to the case drop station.

Palletized kegs of beer, root beer and cases of root beer are staged in the warehouse, ready for shipping all over the United States. One the of the largest problems Sprecher faces currently, is the warehouse itself — it’s not large enough. Until this issue can be addressed, Sprecher tries to load as much finished product as possible directly onto trucks at its three loading docks. Sprecher also has a growing-e-business, shipping products and branded merchandise directly to customers who can’t yet find Sprecher products at their local stores.

Sprecher’s retail shop offers hundreds of SKUs, from clothes and collectibles to flavored ice cream toppings, bread mixes and of course, the complete line of Sprecher’s beers and sodas. The Rathskellar, through the archway in the left of the photo, generates revenue as a venue for hire for company outings, wedding receptions and events of all kinds.

This article appeared in the June/July 2008 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2008.

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