Beer vats worth the transport trouble
It was a massive move, a logistical nightmare — a brewhaha, you might say.
But one year and 108 kilometres down the road, those big beer vats were well worth the trouble, according to Molson Coors.
“The six tanks have actually helped us produce 160 million bottles of beer,” said Forest Kenney, communications manager for the brewing company.
“That’s a fantastic party.”
After a trip down Germany’s Rhine River and a two-week transatlantic journey, the giant fermentation tanks arrived at the Hamilton port late last fall.
That was the easy part.
There were several delays before the arduous trip from the harbour to the Molson Coors brewery near Toronto’s Pearson Airport got under way Jan. 7.
The route was meticulously planned through five municipalities. It had to be — the 45-tonne beer vats were too big to squeeze beneath overpasses.
The trip took 10 days, with the convoy rarely moving at more than a crawl. Traffic lights were removed — 250 in all — and a 75-person crew managed to manoeuvre the beer vats around more than 1,600 service wires bridging the roads between Hamilton’s North-End and Carlingview Drive.
Three months later, the tanks were ready to start ripening.
“They were up and operational as of April 4 and have been fermenting beer for us ever since,” Kenney said. Several brews have passed through the vats, including Canadian, Coors Light beer and some of the company’s newest products — Molson M and Rickard’s Blonde.
Those blends — one, a carbonated lager beer, the other, a German-style Pilsner beer — are on the shelves at beer and liquor stores this holiday season.
Kenney said the six new vats have helped Molson Coors grow its capacity. Over the last two years, the company had upgraded its bottling and labelling facilities. The fermentation tanks now allow the brewer to keep up on the production end.
Despite the painstaking planning required to transport the beer vats and the whopping $24 million price tag, Kenney said Molson Coors would “absolutely” commit to a similar undertaking in the future.
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