A drive through the Shenandoah Valley in rural northwestern Virginia is a journey through natural beauty and history, from the majestic vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains to significant Civil War battlefields and Revolutionary War sites. Nestled among the picture-postcard farmhouses and pastures just outside Elkton, Va., USA is an inconspicuous reminder of the modern age—a state-of-the-art brewing, packaging and distribution facility that manages, through its campus-style layout and green-minded operations, to blend in with the natural scenery. True to the heritage of the Valley and the Coors Brewing Co., the Coors Shenandoah facility uses some of the most modern, energy-efficient processes and technology while adopting practices to further reduce its carbon footprint, which all add up to a facility worthy of being called Beverage World’s Plant of the Year.

For the 450 employees at Coors Shenandoah, who have become familiar with local wildlife visiting the 2,250-acre grounds, which borders Shenandoah National Park, environmental responsibility is more than just a corporate buzzword—it’s a mindset that protects the land and waterways that form the backbone of their own community.

“We’re keenly aware of the natural beauty of the site and truly beautiful surroundings that we’re in. If we ever needed a reminder of the importance of being responsible environmental stewards, we get it every day,” notes Tim Williams, vice president and plant manager of the Coors Shenandoah Brewery Business Unit, as he motions to the scenic backdrop just outside the office window as the mountain peaks rise above the rolling Shenandoah Valley.

With an investment of more than US$300 million and two-and-a-half years of construction, the new brewery was an expansion of an existing Coors blending, finishing, packaging and distribution facility that had been on the Shenandoah Valley site for more than 20 years. Prior to the construction of the brewery, beer was shipped by rail from Coors’ Golden, Colo., USA-based brewery to the Elkton facility where it was then finished, packaged and shipped to East Coast customers.

According to Williams, Bill Coors searched for three years to find the right location for a brewery outside of Golden and ultimately chose Shenandoah due to its proximity to high-quality water. The brewery, which began operations last spring, is a cost-effective operation, built to better supply North East customers with fresh Coors products, according to Andy Pickerell, process operations director. With an annual brewing capacity of seven million barrels, the brewery primarily produces Coors Light and Keystone Light to ship to Eastern US markets, as well as 30 export markets. The investment in the new Shenandoah brewery expansion also streamlines Coors’ supply chain, with an estimated annualized cash savings of US$30 million through reduced freight and improved efficiency.

As Coors’ first new brewery in 130 years, the company took the opportunity to design the 100,000-square-foot brewery as a highly automated, efficient operation using the most up-to-date technology for high-quality production as well as to minimize its environmental impact. While touring the brewhouse with Williams, it’s clear that the Coors Shenandoah team invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into the brewery construction and take great pride in the cutting-edge technology and high productivity levels that are a hallmark of the facility.

The brewery itself is a vast, open space with natural light gleaming off towering stainless-steel equipment all connected by a maze of pipes that pump in grain and water and ultimately turns malt into beer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The brewery was designed with two brew lines, fermentation tanks, aging equipment and grain handling. Construction required the installation of 30 miles of pipe, 142 miles of wire and cable and 2,000 tons of steel.
 

With the goal of having a highly automated process to achieve world-class productivity levels, Coors Shenandoah worked with St. Louis, Mo., USA-based Emerson Process Management to install the Delta V batch distributed control platform, which is integrated with a Proficy MES layer that pulls information from the operating sytem, Laboratory Information management system (LIMS), as well as interfaces with SAP, notes Pickerell.

“When we receive malt, for example, that’s an automated process, so it’s measured at every step along the way. In a normal brewery this size, there would be an army of clerical workers checking on these things manually,” explains Williams.

With only 24 operators running the brewery in four shifts, including everything from grain intake to brewing to packaging, it’s a process that seems to run almost entirely on its own.

“One thing you’ll see here is a lot of technology, but you won’t see a lot of people,” remarks Williams.

However, Coors did not invest in these technologies just for automation’s sake, but to take advantage of benefits of scale.
“With this automation, we’ve enabled our people to become high valued, educated workers. We’ve engineered out the labor-intensive jobs because we want smart people doing smart jobs,” Williams says.

To drive home Coors’ commitment to quality, Williams points out the 40 massive stainless steel fermenting tanks that soar 80 feet into the air, towering over the entire brewhouse. At 21 feet in diameter, each fermenter has the capacity to hold 2 million, 12-ounce cans of beer. Manufactured in Germany by the Ziemann Group, the fermenters were shipped across the Atlantic fully assembled to Hampton Roads, Va., then barged up the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock River to Fredericksburg before finally being driven 109 miles across the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“It was quite a logistical feat,” says Williams with a grin. “The first one took about 15 hours to complete a journey that would take about two hours in a car. We got it down to about six or seven hours by the last one.” And Williams insists the logistical challenge was necessary, noting the quality of the vessels is “nothing short of phenomenal.”

As part of the overall expansion project, Coors Shenandoah also upgraded its packaging capabilities. In addition to the existing keg, bottle and can lines, the plant now has a 1,200-bottle-per-minute changeover bottle line and a new high-speed canning line that runs 2,150 cans per minute. The new lines incorporate leading packaging technology to create a highly automated process, including KHS fillers, Alvey palletizers, Wyard debanders, Busse palletizers, Filtec and Hueft inspection equipment, Krones labelers and Can Lines, Engineering conveyors.

“This facility is truly world class,” asserts Williams, who, as a brewing industry veteran, has spent time in Golden as well as previously working with SABMiller around the globe, including in India, Russia, Hungary and South Africa. “This brewery is the best I’ve had the privilege to work in.”

A Green Vision
Environmental awareness and energy efficiency have always been a fundamental part of Coors Shenandoah’s long-term vision. In the past four years, the facility has reduced its overall energy use and its water use in the plant by more than 15 percent. Coors used the brewery expansion as an opportunity to utilize new technology to further maximize its energy efficiency and minimize its environmental impact, such as a staged ammonia compressor system to reduce energy usage for refrigeration and an expanded CO2 collection system to capture and reuse all of the CO2 from the fermentation process.

The fermenters run on a “closed loop” that allows the brewery to collect the evolved CO2, clean it up, compress it and then reuse it to trim the carbonation of the brewed beer, Williams explains.

“We also then clean our fermenters with CO2 still in the tank after emptying, so we do not vent that CO2 into the atmosphere. We designed in these capabilities as we designed and built the brewery,” Williams notes.

The brewery uses energy efficient, emission-reducing wort boilers supplied by UK-based Briggs Group, and it’s the first major brewer in North America to use a cross flow membrane filtration system, an environmentally friendly process that filters beer down to the microscopic level. The Profi filter system, an innovation of Pall Corp., eliminates the use of diatomaceous earth (DE) filtration, a labor-intensive filtering process used by most breweries that requires solid waste disposal into landfills.
Other green intiaitives include selling waste left over from the brewing process, such as spent grain and spent yeast, as co-products like cattle feed and the installation of an additional biogas boiler at the on-site wastewater treatment plant, where methane produced during the wastewater treatment process is now burned and used to generate heat and electricity. “This enables us to reduce our carbon footprint by replacing natural gas or electricity that would otherwise be used for the boilers and to maintain a constant temperature for the ‘influent’ year round, which enables us to run our anaerobic digesters very efficiently,” explains Williams. For more on Coors Shenandoah’s green practices, visit beverageworld.com.
Larry Teeter, environmental pollution control technician at Coors Shenandoah, points out that Coors also has made a significant investment to voluntarily remove 20 percent of the facility’s phosphorous discharge, with plans to increase that percentage to 50 percent. This commitment to being good environmental stewards is not only an entrenched value in the Coors culture, but also within the local workforce who call the Shenandoah Valley home.

“You can see how beautiful it is here,” says Teeter, motioning to the green pastures and woodlands surrounding the property. “And we’d sure like to keep it this way.”

Having a local work force that’s committed and that has, as Williams describes, “an amazing work ethic,” has enabled the Coors facility to reach benchmarks in productivity while also reducing its environmental footprint.

“It gets back to the people and to the company’s commitment to investing in fantastic technology,” attests Williams. “The company has a commitment to not only build the best and employ the best, but also to that vision that this will be the best, the safest and most productive brewery in the world, and it comes out of the pores of everyone who works here.” At Coors Shenandoah, achieving that vision translates into a passion for excellence.

From Beverage World June 15, 2008