Inside Glasgow’s Tennent’s brewery to discover how the famous Scottish lager is made

National World - LocalTV

We visit Tennent’s brewery, recently ranked number 2 for experiences in Glasgow by Tripadvisor.

Transcript

00:00Okay, good morning. My name's Kevin Quinn. I'm Continuous Improvement Manager at Tennant's

00:05Well Park Brewery. I've been here for 25 years and my privilege is to take these a tour today,

00:10so let's go. Three to three and a half brews. So again, 350,000 litres. And if we're putting

00:23that in a 500 mil can, 700,000 cans per vessel. And the vessels at the bottom here are maturation.

00:31So after fermentation, the yeast will come out of suspension. We'll crop that off,

00:35put it to storage and reuse it for another fermentation.

00:39We'll get into canning first to see what they're running. So empty cans

00:46come in. So they come in in the wagon, the guys offload them, put them onto the line,

00:50and then it'll feed through to our depalletiser. We've got a vacuum bridge. So this is the first

00:56quality check on the can. So if the can isn't completely round or has a bad seam on it,

01:02it'll kick it off. It'll not create a vacuum and it'll just go down and shoot.

01:06So this'll check three different things on the can. Check the

01:11the inner sidewall of the can, it'll check the base and it'll check the seam on it.

01:14Okay. And reject if they're not good.

01:20Well, base in our sidewallet and the plan. Yeah.

01:23So the only part of the process when the can's open. Yeah.

01:26It's from here to here. Well, you can see how cold they are at this point.

01:34Oh, I see my skin frozen.

01:37So our temperature for filling is less than three degrees.

01:44And that, that makes the gas more stable. It doesn't want to come out of the liquid.

01:47It's came from fermentation, into maturation, into filtration, and then

01:52into empty packaging. So there's no major microorganisms that'll grow in beer that'll kill you.

01:58You do get some beer spoilers. And as a belt embraces, we'll pasteurise to make sure it's safe for the

02:04consumer. But because of the pH of the liquid and the alcohol content, there's nothing,

02:10yeah, nothing bad it'll grow in, in your beer. In terms of spoilers, it would make your beer cloudy or taste sour.

02:17So what temperature is this at roughly? So the kill zone in the middle is, is 65 degrees.

02:23So yeah, get pasteurisation units. So it's one minute, 65 degrees. And a typical 10th

02:30slag, it'll be 10 minutes in the kill zone. So cold water at the start, superheat in the middle,

02:36cold water at the end. So we do not produce, see the plastic rings anymore that people used to throw

02:42in the rivers and kill the fish and things like that. So the only plastic we use is on the pallet

02:48wrap and that'll have a recycled content as well. Our can waste operates, we've got a target of 0.5%.

02:56So that's our KPI. So we'll try and hit that KPI target, but because it's such a fast moving line

03:05as well, that waste can become a big number. The cans round into the infeed, cardboard put on here,

03:12and if you follow it through the process, you'll see the carton being erected through the machine,

03:18and you'll see the cans behind on the conveyor. You'll then see the cans starting to push in.

03:28There are two stages of fermentation. You get primary, where you turn the sugar into alcohol,

03:34and then you get secondary, because during primary, the yeast excretes a compound called acetyl.

03:40And during secondary fermentation, it actually mops that back up. So we'll analyse it each day to make

03:45sure it's below the flavour threshold, and then it moves on to the next stage in the process.

03:50So also we propagate our own yeast as well. So all breweries have got their own yeast strain.

03:55So our strain will be held in an outside lab at minus 150 degrees. We'll call in a slope,

04:01and we'll start growing it in the lab. So we'll grow it in there, we'll give it some water,

04:06give it some food, give it some vitamins, give it some oxygen, and then that grows. So I don't know if you

04:12know anything about yeast, but yeast cells are all female, and they create daughters during fermentation.

04:17So for each one cell you put in, you would expect two to three out. So you have an excess of yeast as

04:23well. So they'll grow it up, step it up, and then it ends in the brewery in a propagation vessel.

04:29We'll step up, scale up again, and do the same, and then it ends up in a full-blown fermentation.

04:35And at that stage, it's generation zero, and we'll use it for six generations and then put it to waste.

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