We went to a bottling plant today.

 One of the many cold rooms that the beer is placed into (at -1 c) to facilitate clearing. There are finings placed in the tanks/containers before the cold room.

This is the kegging area.

A pano shot of the bottling line (click to enlarge).

This is the first filter. It is a 6 micron filter. The one on the left was removed to be cleaned and sanitized. The right one is what they look like when clean. The run the beer through a number of filters, the idea being that they clean up the beer early in the line so that when the beer gets to the .45 micron filter, less has to be filtered out. That’s because the 4.5 cost a lot more money than the early filters. Filtering will remove 10 percent of the color and flavor of a beer.

Here the tank is full of beer and ready to be bottled.

We sample the first beer of this bottling batch.

Here’s a video of the line in action.

Some of the finished product.