This tour starts facing the kegger with the four upside down kegs on the
left.
Back in the old days of 1995-1998 Big Sky Brewing Company used the older
barrel shaped kegs with bungs in the sides. When a keg came back to us we
had to pry out the old bung, hand clean every keg, hand fill every keg,
hammer in a new bung, and load the keg onto a pallet. Nowadays, we take the
keg, turn it upside-down, put it on the left-hand side of the Kegger, and
let the machine do all the work. First it washes the outside of the keg, then it
empties any left over beer from the keg, sanitizes the keg, fills the keg,
turns the keg right-side-up, and rolls it to the edge of the pallet. From
start to finish it takes about one minute to go from an empty, “dirty” keg
to a full clean one. Our younger employees don’t know how good they have it!
If you turn around and look at the back of the brewery, you can see pallets
of empty bottles, our basketball court, empty keg storage, and the cooler
wall that has obviously seen some abuse from our forklift operators! Once a
pallet of kegs is full, it is picked up by our forklift operator, stretch
wrapped, and taken into the cooler, which is our next and final destination. |
