Making Budweiser: How Does a Large Brewery Work?

With the explosion of craft breweries in recent years, I’ve been savoring hundreds of peculiar, original, and inventive brews from around the country and touring those breweries in person. The process behind making craft beer has become a clear reflection of the care and attention that small brewers put into their product; from sourcing water to hand-picking hops from the farms of their choosing.

The world of big brewing though, has been a mystery to me. To cover some gaps in understanding of what goes into large scale beer manufacturing, I headed to Newark, New Jersey, (just a stone’s throw away) from the airport, to one of the many large brewing facilities owned by Anheuser-Busch, where the legendary Budweiser and Stella Artois beers are brewed and bottled.

Beer samples on your office desk may seem inappropriate at any other company but not here at the brewery 🍻

Commercial kegs that would be shipped to bars around the area

Safety in the brewery is taken so seriously that in order to cross from one side of the floor to another, one needs to go through a series of latches and gates

Although Stella Artois is brewed in Belgium, the brand is owned by Anheuser-Busch who distributes the beer around the US

Inside a massive beer fermenter that resembles a rocket launch pad

Anheuser-Busch built its own set of railway routes — all grain for making beer arrives directly to the brewery via trains

The assembly part that puts the top of the can and seals it together with the can is considered one of the most intricate and expensive parts of the canning process

The graveyard of cans that were filtered out by the computerized sorting machine

Anheuser-Busch
Public tours available through factories in St. Louis, MO; Merrimack, NH; Fort Collins, CO; Houston, TX; Jacksonville, FL, Fairfield, CA (see schedule)
anheuser-busch.com

Select brews