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More columns and
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Vol. 21 — No. 1
02•03 — 12
SECTION B
FEATURES &
COLUMNS
Hooking Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Athena’s Fermentables . . . . . . . 16
Cask Ale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Beer Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Green . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Beer Predator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Spirits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
BeerSensei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Tunes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Art of Beer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Troegs Puts it all Out Front at New Hershey Brewery
BY JACK CURTIN
The sign at 200 E. Hershey
Park Drive is small, unobtrusive, and
wooden. It’s no more than a few feet
wide and long, and staked low to the
ground by the driveway of the plant
located adjacent to the Hershey entertainment
properties. It’s something
you could easily miss even if you were
looking for it, certainly not a beacon
for the casual passer-by. Because local
authorities do what local authorities
do, Troegs Brewing Co. has so far been
denied permission to mount the large,
attention-getting signage which the
company’s fantastic new brewery and
tasting room surely warrants.
No problem. If you build it and
serve world-class beer, as the old saying
almost goes, they will come.
Mid-afternoon on the Wednesday
between Christmas and New Year’s,
the 150-seat tasting room, which greets
visitors upon entering the building, has
a more than decent-sized crowd on
hand, one that will more than double
over the next two hours. Presumably,
the crowds will only get larger and
larger because, to recycle yet another
old chestnut, it’s all about the beer.
This brewery, which went operational
late last year is so state-of-the-art that it
is almost sui generis, with all the technical
expertise of Germany’s respected
BrauKon GmbH and the penchant
Rumspringa
Golden Bock
Brewed with
Lancaster County Honey
www.lancasterbrewing.com
ABV
6.9%
Beer Rating:
91 Points - Exceptional
Beer Testing Institute, 2011
Chris and John Trogner in front of the pilot brewery at their new location in Hershey.
of Troegs founders John and Chris
Trogner to develop techniques and
systems that enable them to brew “our
way” combining to create something
of a manufacturing masterpiece.
It’s a must-see. The very nature of
the new Troegs is almost overwhelming
— the primary 120-hectoliter brewhouse
visible on a platform above and
behind the long multi-tap bar which
is the focus of the tasting room; the
20-hectoliter pilot system where the
sought-after scratch beers and other
limited releases will be brewed immediately
to the right of the bar; the
self-guided tour system which allows
visitors (pint in hand if so inclined,
and who wouldn’t be?) to literally
walk through the brewing process is
enhanced by attractive graphic signage
which lets them know what they are
watching. The new Troegs offers an
immersive experience unlike any other
in brewing.
They will come for the beer, but
they will remember the adventure.
Asked if the whole point was to
make the brewery a tourist attraction,
John Trogner pauses briefly. “That’s
interesting,” he finally says. “We never
really thought of it in those terms.
Chris and I gave tours at the old
Harrisburg plant every Saturday for
15 years and that has been a big part
of our marketing. The more people
we showed around, the more beer we
seemed to sell. Each year it got bigger
and bigger until we had to start taking
reservations and even turn people
away. So tours are in our blood and
we definitely kept them in mind while
designing everything.
“But what we were really looking
for was transparency. There’s almost
no food manufacturing anymore
where you can see what you’re eating
made right in front of you,” he said. “I
like to be able to do that and I think
other people do too. We invite people
curious about beer to taste and tour
their way into understanding what
craft beer is. Everything is on display
and there’s nowhere to hide. We have
to always be on our A-game.”
Chris Trogner estimates that the
new location was about 70 percent
operational as the New Year dawned
and that they won’t reach 100 percent
until this summer. Among other
things, there is catching up to do:
Troegs went three weeks without
producing a drop of beer during the
move and the pipelines need to be
refilled quickly. Behind the scenes,
away from the view of the public,
forklifts and other equipment were in
the process of moving things around
and torches were sparking as 24 tanks
which had recently been moved over
from Harrisburg were being welded
into the system.
Energy saving and recovery
systems abound throughout. There is
a 6-roller mill in front of three huge
indoor malt silos that have automatic
gap adjustments so that it grinds
different varieties of malt perfectly.
There are sieves between each set of
rollers so only perfectly ground malt
passes through and the rest moves on
to the next set of rollers to be ground
again. A centrifuge recovers used yeast
and sends it to a recovery tank. The
computer-controlled processes make
each brew consist to maximize the use
Continued on page 3-B
2011 Gold Medal

February - March 2012 Ale Street News — Section B Page 3 - B
The BrauKon
Connection
John Trogner was prowling the
floor at the 2004 Craft Brewers
Conference in San Diego, looking
for a solution. “Our original kettle
at Troegs was direct fire and we were
quickly burning a hole in the bottom
of it. I was working on a design for a
boiling system using pumps and steam
along with mass steam flow control
and some simple automation.
“But the suppliers I was talking
to were not very into the idea; most
of them just wanted to sell what they
already had. ‘Go talk to Markus’
somebody finally suggested.” That was
Markus Lohner, who had founded
BrauKon GmbH in Bavaria the
previous year. Trogner and his brother
Chris ended up having beers and
extensive discussions with Lohner
that night because, he says, “Markus
was the first supplier that listened to
what we thought we wanted and built
around it.” That meeting was had a
profound effect on both companies.
“We discussed John’s needs over
the next weeks and months and I had
more and more the opinion that the
boiling system he requested was not
really an investment which helped him
much,” Lohner recalls. “It only helped
to solve the immediate problem and
was not a solution for growth in the
near future. I explained to him what
I would do if it were my brewery and
we ended up with a contract to enlarge
his 2-vessel brewhouse with two additional
vessels – integrating his old
system into the new one. It enabled
them to grow, the automation helped
them to be more consistent and the
new boiling system improved the beer
quality.”
It may have been an even bigger
deal for BrauKon than for Troegs,
because that was the first brewhouse
the company ever sold and installed.
Among other things, the relationship
set them on a path which has made
BrauKon a major player on the
brewing scene in the Philadelphia
region in recent months. Even as
their engineers were in the process of
getting Troegs’ new brewhouse up and
running last fall, BrauKon delivered
a 50-bbl brewhouse to Northeastern
Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Brewing
Co., a $10 million start-up founded
by the descendants of Charles Stegmaier.
Then, in January, nearly identical
BrauKon systems arrived at Sly
Fox Brewing Co. in Pottstown, PA and
Flying Fish Brewing Co. in NJ. The
Sly Fox system is a fully automated
2-vessel 50-hecto brewhouse; the
Flying Fish version is a 3-vessel 50-bbl
brewhouse.
Lohner has relished the diversity
of American beers from the start and
has brewed in the US. He was project
manager for Beraplan, a since-closed
Munich brewery manufacturer, when
a 2002 meeting in Newport, KY
about equipment for the embryonic
Hofbräuhaus so impressed him that
he moved his family here and was
the brewmaster there when it opened
in May 2003. “I had to brew their
basic beers according to Munich
Hofbräuhaus recipes, but I was also
allowed to brew one seasonal every
month with my own recipes, 12 new
beers in one year. That is more than a
lot of German brewmasters get to do
in their whole lives.”
BrauKon was born out of that
experience because Lohner envisioned
its primary purpose to be creating a
second version of Hofbräuhaus. Fortunately
for a host of brewers around the
world, starting up a brewery manufacturing
company was slower and
more complicated than he’d thought
and BrauKon moved in a different
direction to become what is today one
of Germany’s most respected brewery
manufacturers.
— Jack Curtin
Troegs
Continued from page 1-B
of ingredients. John, as brewmaster,
can check whatever is going on in the
brewhouse from his mobile phone
or iPad whenever he chooses to or is
asked to by the brewing staff.
“Brewing is an ever-changing task;
your eyes, ears and of course nose and
taste buds affect what you do during
the brew,” he explains. “Our brewers
evaluate the ingredients and brew
conditions to make small adjustments
and if they need a second opinion they
always call me. This way, I can check
in to see what’s happening directly and
make tweaks in real time. Nothing
beats a good brewer in the brew house,
but having this ability gives them more
support.”
Not that computerization is
without its own potential for the unexpected.
“About 7 pm one Saturday
night during our first weeks up here,”
John recalls, “we’d done an event of
some sort and I was getting ready to go
home, when I heard something going
on in the brewhouse. I went running
up there and found the computer
had not been set correctly and it had
already started a brew and mashed in
on it is own and was halfway through.
I ended up staying until 3 am to make
sure everything went right.”
The self-guided tour (you can also
make appointments for a guided one)
is going to be most enjoyable when
there is a brew happening on the pilot
system because nobody is ever going
to get any closer to the way it happens
than that. Among other highlights
down the hall is the Dreamweaver
Room, where the popular wheat beer
is fermented in open fermenters with
top-cropping yeast, a strain that rises
to the top as fermentation slows down.
This has been a Chris Trogner priority
since Troegs first opened and making it
happen turned out to be fairly simple,
his brother says. “We pump filtered
air into the room, creating a positive
pressure. The tanks have a removable
lid, making them easy to clean without
the need to climb in. The big windows
in front allowed our guests to see what
fermentation looks like. Its very challenging
describing what yeast and
fermentation looks like, now it’s easy.”
Beer geek and neophyte alike will
enjoy that stop, but the barrel-aging
room a bit further down the hall will
probably have the former salivating.
There are only a few empties in there
at present and the room is only used
for tasting sessions for guided tour
groups, but there will come a day
when intriguing new taste profiles are
slowly developing inside oaken casks.
Talk of new markets and beers can
wait for another day, but it seemed
fair to ask the brothers Trogner before
leaving just how scary taking a leap such
as they have truly is. One remembers,
one cannot forget, how cautious,
so very cautious, they were 15 years
back when the thought of entering
the Philadelphia market appeared
to induce cold sweats. “Actually, we
really had nothing to lose back then
because we didn’t have anything,”
says John. “There’s a lot more pressure
now because we have 65 employees
depending on us and our customers
have come to expect a certain quality
and level of beer coming out of here.”
Then again, suggests his brother, “that
also means we have 65 motivated
people to help us make sure the beer is
good and we are successful.” ✒ ✒ ✒