Fuller's Brewery Tour 2010

While in London for the Eldest's Graduation back in 2010, we had the chance to visit the Fuller's Brewery.

As it turned out we had a personal family tour, the tour guide, John and the 3 of us. The tour guide was an ex-employee.

 Here is the tourguide in his yellow safety vest and our eldest whose back you may recall from other Past Trip posts.

We were first given an overview of the making of beer and then a look at some of the older equipment no longer used. The brewery uses so much water that they draw local water overnight to a huge tank for the next day's beer making, so as not to affect local residents while they are taking their morning showers.

Antique tub for heating the wort.

 Special reserve ales are aged in casks, we bought a few to try.

 There were 2 keg filling lines, one manual and one automatic.
Manual.
The guys fill the kegs, someone pounds in a plug, they stack up the kegs and a guy takes the stack to the warehouse. The guys get coffee breaks, in the old days the workers got beer breaks.

Automatic.
Robot puts empty kegs onto the line, they get filled, it takes them back off after they are filled. It gets no coffee break. The kegs take the conveyor belt at bottom left, go to the background of the photo and through the machine that cleans, fills and plugs the keg.

You can make out the orange robot in the upper third of the photo, it was removing the filled casks from the line and stacking them up for a human fork lift operator to move to the warehouse.