Friday Afternoon

As you’ve figured by now, I don’t really have many opportunities to get out and see things around here so when an opportunity arises, I snatch it up.  Even if it’s to the brewery of a beverage I don’t particularly care for.  So guess where I went to?

Club Brewery!  Club Brewery was founded in 1957 as a joint venture between Swiss and Liberian companies and started brewing in 1961.  It’s been operating almost continuously since then, only having to shut down during the worst part of the civil war.  There’s only one brewing facility and it’s on the outskirts of Monrovia.  To say the least, it’s huge!

It brews three main beverages - Club, Club Dark and Guinness Foreign Extra Stout.  By volume Club is first, with Guinness catching up quickly (almost even at this point) and the Club Dark a distant third.  They also periodically brew a non-alcoholic Malt, but as you can imagine, the demand isn’t that high for the Malt.

The brewery operates 5 days a week with two shifts (brew, clean, sleep, brew, clean, sleep).  They told us that, given the difficulty of training and keeping good workers, they just can’t run 24-hours a day.

Lucky for us the day we were there they were brewing the Guinness.  Guinness has issued approximately 160 licenses around the world to brew Foreign Extra.  Apparently Guinness ships some syrup and other ingredients to go into the processing, and they require samples from 5 different stages of each batch to be sent to Dublin for analysis, and thereby maintain the quality of the product with the Guinness label.  Now, this isn’t the Guinness Draught; it has some of the flavor, but none of the real smoothness of a real Guinness Stout, but it’s Guinness.  And last year Monrovia Brewery ranked 3rd out of the 160 licenses.  A few years ago they had #1 for several years running but  . . . oh well.

After a brief introduction, we started our tour.  We started out in the control room where they had a giant wall full of diagrams, buttons and lights.  We joked about how none of the lights seemed to be working and our guide laughed.  Apparently it wasn’t for the usual Liberian reason, the reality is Monrovia Brewery has modernized, but decided to keep the huge display panel because it’s a good easy way to describe the brewery processing to people.  It was - smart folks!

When we were there, they started milling some grain.  This is the control panel for the milling process:

Leaving the control center we walked towards the main production area.  We were immediately faced with the scale of this operation.  This is not your basic home-brewing set-up!

When someone asked how much beer they brew in a batch, they explained that it varies from batch to batch.  When pressed, they spit out some number in hectoliters.  When asked to put that in gallons, the brewer said, “Well, we don’t work in gallons, so we don’t know.”  In near frustration one of our team said, “Well how many bottles do you get out of a batch.”  The guy said, “Hmmmmm . . .”  glanced over at his colleague, who raised his eyes, and the guy finally said, “A lot, believe me, a lot!”

As any good beer lover (or home brewer) knows, you use yeast to make beer.  As we were informed, yeast is a living organism, and in the brewing process it feeds on sugars that are added to make alcohol (now is alcohol the . . . I don’t think I want to go there).  In case you were wondering, no, they don’t use the little packets of baker’s yeast you get at the store.  Like everything else here, Monrovia Brewery goes Big with its yeast.

In case you were wondering, those are two more tanks on either side of this one.  And there was a fourth.  And they were numbered 1-2-3-4.  Actually, they were numbered 4-3-1-2 (from left to right).  Don’t ask me why, this is Liberia.

So you may ask, how do they mix their ingredients and move product from one stage to another.  At the early part of the process it’s plumbing.  And you guessed it - Big plumbing.

And then where does it go once it’s been brewed?  Well, if you look to the metal square on the left, it says “Storage Tanks.”  And these are the storage tanks:

Again, not quite home brew scale of production.  

Monrovia Brewing was quite proud of their lab.  Apparently it is one of the more sophisticated labs in Liberia and other businesses often will request them to run specific types of tests.

They’ve definitely modernized their processes (think $30,000 instruments instead of $3,000 instruments), but they showed us the old “manual” devices they keep around just in case the new stuff fails (imagine having to visually rate the color of the beer to determine if it is within tolerances as opposed to simply pouring some into an instrument).  

Now, I’ve joked how un home-brew like this operation is, but these guys are brewers.  So all around the plant you’d see little chalk-boards with things like: SVI; Date; Brew; HL; REM printed on them and various numbers written down in chalk.  And in the lab, well, they had part of the recipe taped to the wall:

You wouldn’t want to add the yeast recipe for Guinness into the Club!

We asked about special ingredients and were assured there were none - only a special recipe and, no, they wouldn’t share it with us.  Then we asked if a jar on the lab shelf held the special ingredient:

Again, we were told no.  Apparently, when they came back to clean up the place after the closure during the civil war, a snake had taken up residence in the lab.  Someone asked what kind of snake it was and the lab tech immediately said, “I don’t know.  It’s a snake, kill it, why do you need to know what kind it is?”  Like I said in a previous posting, Liberians don’t like snakes.

We left the lab to check out the last stages of the brewing process and came into one of the final processing rooms.  There were pipes and pressure gauges everywhere - no clue what they did.

I took a picture then thought to myself, “Beer and guns - you can’t make this stuff up!”

Then it dawned on me (several days later . . .) that's H&K is not H+K.  So it’s beer, and guns, not beer and guns.

We then headed to the bottling part of the plant - eye protection and earplugs on.  Earplugs because it was loud, eye protection because they claimed that occasionally bottles “explode” and send a bottle cap flying through the air.  We were in the bottling area not 5 minutes before “pow!”  It sounded like a gunshot.  I’m glad they were thinking safety!

As you can see, it was a place full of conveyor belts.  Bottles cleaned, inspected for damage or contaminants, labeled, filled, capped, cartoned and then placed on pallets.  I may have missed a step or two in there, but that’s pretty much it.  All of the bottles in these shots look like new because, well, they’re new.  Guinness decided to change the shape of the bottles (the new bottles look better, but I like the old label better) so they were running these through the system to clean them.  The rack in the background takes it into a giant machine that cleans them (something like 8 stages, about 2 hours and super high temperatures).

Once they’re cleaned they very quickly get filled and capped and then herded like cattle back onto the conveyor belt.

To be quickly crated and set aside for shipping.

As we walked into the warehouse, I suddenly thought I was in a dream . . .

Might this be heaven?  I think for Homer Simpson it would be!  The stacks to the right and the left have approximately 3,200 bottles in them (or so said the chalk boards at the ends of the stacks).

Well, I wasn’t in heaven (face it, it was Club and . . . not the better of the Guinness brews).  Still, our hosts provided free beers and snacks (one Guinness, one Club) and I appreciated the hospitality.  

So Monrovia Brewery is, for now, my home town brewery and I must support it in principle, but that doesn’t mean I have to like Club.  Because I don’t.  Oh well, you can’t expect everything.