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Sierra Nevada Brewery is doing what it has always been doing -- producing high-quality, distinctive beers and selling them like crazy with barely a speck of advertising or expensive marketing. They're in the enviable position where everyone else wants to be -- managing high growth without the distraction of public offerings, expensive advertising, or marketing gimmicks. Sierra Nevada has developed this cult following through what they put in the bottle. No balloons and bands. No pretty girls flashing million-dollar smiles. No trendy beer styles appealing to the flavor-of-the-month crowd. Just high-quality traditional beer styles with generous amounts of expensive hops and malts and produced with impecable quality control procedures. "We've let the market decide our production, without big promotions or marketing," marketing director Steve Harrison told the Erickson Report in an interview at the brewery. Harrison was the first employee hired by Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi after the company started in 1979. Grossman and Harrison had grown up in Southern California, and when Grossman told him he was going to start a microbrewery, Harrison eagerly volunteered to join the startup venture. "When we started there was only Anchor Steam and Liberty Ale, this incredibly highly hopped ale that was completely foreign to conventional American tastes," Harrison said. "We knew if people went for Liberty Ale and Anchor Steam, there was a chance for our distinctive ales. We started without a single marketing test or consumer survey. We never would have made it if we had produced what was popular in the market at the time. We had a simple philosophy -- we made the beers and ales that we wanted to make because we liked them," he said." Sierra Nevada is in the midst of an unprecedented expansion, growing from 30,000 barrels in 1990 to 201,000 barrels in 1995 and an estimated 250,000 barrels in 1996. They're also embarking on the most ambitious expansion in the company's history -- constructing a new brewery next to their current site which will have the eventual capacity of 600,000 barrels a year. New $2 Million Bottling Plant Scheduled for Annual Shutdown To continue its incredible growth rate, Sierra Nevada has maintained a policy of constantly upgrading plant facilities and improving quality control. The most recent example of this policy was the installation of a new $2 million bottling plant that was just completed in February. The state-of-the-art 650 bottle/minute bottling line will help Sierra Nevada reach its maximum capacity of 250,000 - 300,000 barrels/year at their 27,000-sq.ft. facility on East 20th Street south of Chico. The old bottling line, installed at the brewery when it opened in 1988, was a mixture of used, reconditioned, and self-designed equipment accumulated over the years. Although the brewery was able to avoid major maintenance problems, the burden of operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, put demands on the equipment that could have resulted in a major breakdown. A year ago, Ken Grossman decided that Sierra Nevada needed a completely new and modern bottling and packaging plant. He traveled extensively, visiting breweries and talking to equipment suppliers to come up with the most efficient system. "Our old bottle filler came out of Rolling Rock Brewery in Latrobe, PA," Grossman said. "It was a vintage 1962 Semco filler, capable of 400 bottles a minute with low airs. It was still a decent filler but it wastes a bit of beer in spilling over. You could do a kind of a CIP (clean -in-place) -- flushing, filling and sanitizing -- but it still wastes hot water and beer. "The technology has changed since 1962 when the filler was built," Grossman said. "The new system we have now is a short tube, double pre-evacuation filler that allows a low air content that is almost immeasurable -- 25 - 50 parts per billion (ppb) of oxygen. On top of that , it completely CIPs the filler with every contact part treated with solution and sanitized." Installation Schedule Critical to Minimize Production Delays As Grossman began putting the pieces of the new bottling line together and ordering equipment, he realized an efficient installation plan was going to be vital if the brewery was not going to go down for several days and sacrifice production. For every day brewing and bottling is suspended, 800 barrels of Sierra Nevada's beer are not brewed. This amounts to tens of thousands of dollars a day in potentially lost sales. Steve Harrison, who divides his time between marketing and scheduling, was given the assignment of coming up with the schedule to minimize production delays. |
Harrison scheduled the installation during the one time in the year the brewery shuts down to have the boiler inspected. The brewing schedule was arranged to produce excess inventory of both bottled and draft beer. When the surplus inventory was in the warehouse, installation began. It was the last shift Sunday afternoon, February 4. Ken Grossman was returning to Chico from a business trip. By the time Grossman arrived in the brewery at midnight, the old bottling line had been dismantled and removed. Installation of the new equipment began and was in place by Monday, February 5. For the next week, a crew of 15-18 people worked around the clock on the piping, wiring, and plumbing. The brewhouse shut down on Monday, February 12, for the annual boiler inspection. Crews tested the bottling system with runs of beer Monday and Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, the new line was up and the first product, porter, was sent through the line. Brewery down time: two days. Bottling line installation time: nine days. Lost brewery production: none. "We lost only two days of brewing production," Grossman said. "Steve Harrison had scheduled this all out for us. We shifted production first into draft beer and doubled up in racking. When we had enough draft, we started bottling seven days a week to build up inventory." Sierra Nevada now has a bottling line that is one of the most modern and efficient in the country. The suppliers are: Krones bottler and labler. Bevco filler, Busse glass depalatizer, Bevco conveyers, Hartwell case packer, Loveless case erector, Mead six-pack erector; Pearson case-pack stuffer, Elliot case sealer, and Columbia case depalitizer. Total cost of the new packaging line: a little over $2 million. Financing was provided by the Bank of America. "Redhook has the same style filler," Grossman said. "Theirs is a little smaller -- they have 60-valve filler, we have a 72-valve. Widmer has the same as Redhook, and Sudwerks in Davis has one like it, and a few other regional brewers have systems similar to this. We're at maximum capacity in the brewhouse now," he said. "We're packaging one shift a day but can now go to 2 - 3 shifts a day. We'll have to add on in our warehousing. My plan is to build a whole new bottling shop in the new plant so we'll have two bottling lines in five or ten years. This is a pretty good system; we expect it will do quite well for us." Sierra Nevada's Brewing Equipment Profile Original Equipment Installed at new plant in 1988 100-barrel Huppmann brewhouse 4 100-barrel open fermenters 11 68-barrel secondary fermenters Expansion Begins 1989 11 200-barrel secondary fermenters 4 200 barrel unitanks 8 200-barrel bright beer tanks Spring 1992 6 200 barrel unitanks Fall 1992 6 200 barrel unitanks Spring 1993 6 200 barrel unitanks 8 50,000 lb. grain silos Spring 1994 8 400 barrel unitanks Fall 1995 8 400 barrel unitanks Spring 1996 8 400 barrel unitanks |
