A Tour of Beer Places
Karl J. Siebert

Over the thousands of years that brewing has been practiced, many divergent approaches (variations in procedures or equipment) have been developed to accomplish the same operations. Most of these have fallen out of fashion, but a number of them have persisted. Milling can be done either dry or wet (with steam injection into the grist case). Mashing can be carried out by decoction (heating by transferring a portion of the wort from the mash vessel into the kettle, heating it there and then returning it to the mash, or by infusion (direct heating of the mash vessel). Wort can be made with a starchy adjunct, a sugary adjunct, or with no adjunct; only the first of these requires an adjunct cooker, and many brewhouses are built without them. Mash filtration can be accomplished with either a lauter tun or a mash filter. Within each vessel type, different geometries and materials can be employed. For example, fermenters can be made of many materials (stone, wood, concrete, glass lined mild steel, or stainless steel) and in many shapes (horizontal or vertical cylinders, loaf shaped tanks, unitanks and cylindroconicals). In countries where a higher proportion of beer is sold on draught, keg filling equipment is much more automated than is the case in the US. Examples of some of these variations will be shown in the course of a photographic tour of small and large breweries that spans North America (the US and Mexico), Europe (the UK, Denmark and Hungary), Australia and Japan.