Birthday Brewing in Irwindale : Industry: Celebrating its first decade, Miller Beer plant management comes on strong but keeps its head.
It has been 10 years since the Miller Beer plant, that aromatic, steam-belching factory with the towering stainless steel vats next to the Foothill Freeway, turned out its first batch of Irwindale brew.
Since then, Miller has developed a reputation around the San Gabriel Valley as an effective inside fighter in the region’s environmental battles, a zipped-up member of Irwindale’s community of employers and an unflagging beer-making machine.
Plant production is up to 5.5 million barrels a year--about 170 million total gallons of Miller Genuine Draft, Miller High Life, Miller Lite and the rest. “And we’re bursting at the seams,” project engineer Ed Richter said.
In one day of round-the-clock bottling and packaging, the factory can turn out an imposing two-story heap of beer--enough cans or bottles to block the light coming through the loading bay at the rear of the plant.
“That’s a one- or two-day supply,” Richter said last week during a rare tour of the plant, nodding toward a squared-off pile of Miller Lite cans as big as a small apartment building. “It’ll all be gone by tomorrow.”
In recent years, outsiders have been about as welcome at the Irwindale Miller plant as they would be on the production line of the Stealth bomber. In the highly competitive beer market, brewing secrets must be guarded as warily as defense secrets, plant officials say.
“The last thing we would want would be for anyone to get our cold filtration system (used to make Miller Genuine Draft),” said public relations manager Victor Franco. “It’s what makes it more than an average beer.”
The factory’s garden-like 255-acre site, with date palms lining the meandering road leading to the front entrance, is patrolled incessantly by guards in Chevy Blazers. Guards also staff a concrete pillbox near the entrance, screening everybody who comes in or goes out.
The 1,000 or so Miller employees--who earn up to $20 an hour, plus benefits and three cases of beer a month--even adopt the closemouthed stance of wartime defense plant workers. Loose lips may not sink ships these days, several suggested, but they can sink jobs (although Miller officials deny that there are any restrictions on employees talking to the press).
One Miller worker, approached by a reporter in the employee parking lot, turned pale, rolled up his car window and sped away. A few minutes later, a guard vehicle rolled up.
“Have you been asking questions?” demanded a security guard, who said that the reporter must either leave the grounds or be accompanied while on the property by a public relations officer.
But 10th anniversary celebrations have relaxed the restrictions somewhat. The factory has taken on a festive look lately, with colored pennants flying from the tops of those enormous vats, which will soon be painted to look like giant beer cans. In three weeks, Miller Brewing Co. President Leonard J. Goldstein will preside over a day of festivities, including a VIP tour of the plant.
“We want to highlight the growth that Miller has experienced in the past 10 years here,” said Franco. “We’ve almost doubled our brewing capacity in that time.”
To mark the anniversary, plant officials agreed to show a Times reporter through the plant, from the railroad siding where freight cars from the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway deliver a daily supply of corn meal, corn syrup and malted barley all the way to the vast packaging unit where carousel-style machines can fill 2,800 12-ounce cans a minute.
“Brewing beer is a living process,” said Richter, a tall, lanky Ohioan with a telltale expansion at the waist, the sure-fire characteristic of a veteran beer maker. “It’s almost like a farm.”
A modern brewery is a peculiar mixture of warm spots and frigid rooms, with panoramas of giant vessels in which lagoons of beer age in cool solitude, or of rattling production lines, where mobs of cans and bottles rush toward their eventual fleeting encounters with beer drinkers’ lips.
Turn a corner and the pungent smell of fermentation or boiling cereal suddenly smacks you in the face like a wet rag.
The catalyst that ultimately transforms farm products into frosted brewskies is, of course, yeast, the organism that can magically turn a soupy mash of grain and water into a carbonated liquid with an alcoholic kick.
And the Merlins in the process are the brewers.
“In the old days, it was somebody stirring a pot over an open fire with a broom handle,” Richter said. Now, the mixing and tasting process is done in a computerized brew house, with an electronic board to keep track of the changes along the way.
Brewer Charles Townsend, an affable man with a frosted beard, matter-of-factly explains his role.
“Don’t give away any trade secrets,” said Franco nervously, as Townsend described the process.
Using the electronic board, Townsend can draw vast quantities of grain from storage silos, sending it flowing like water through pneumatic tubes to a series of gigantic kettles in the brew house.
When the grain gets there, Townsend sets about 18 tons of malt to cooking at a slow boil in one kettle, and eight tons of grits in another. At just the right moment, he brings the two grainy broths together and cooks them some more. Heat turns the mash, a thick, greenish substance peppered with unprocessed kernels, into a sugary soup.
Even monitoring the process is largely electronic nowadays, said Townsend, who dresses in the casual clothing of a man attending a back-yard barbecue. “You don’t taste it any more,” he said. “There are some tests that you apply, like an iodine test to make sure that the mash is converging.”
Cooked grain is filtered out--most is recycled as cattle feed--and the liquid is boiled some more. Hops are added, giving the stuff its bitter taste. Finally, the brew is chilled and sent to those steel-jacketed fermenters, where the brewers add yeast.
As he talks, Townsend alertly watches the dials on his board and keeps his ear cocked for recognizable sounds outside the control room. “Once you start the process, you go by sounds,” he said. “You listen for the steam to shut off or for the agitator to go on or off.”
After nine days under the subtle, burbling influence of the yeast, the beer, now carbonated and alcoholic, is sent through filters that are much like those on swimming pools. Then it flows into “aging vessels.” There it sits in isolation for two weeks, at a chilly 30 degrees, until it’s ready to be bottled, canned or put into a cask.
Some brews are pasteurized during the packaging process; the draft beer is “cold filtered” in a surgically clean room, run by operators in operating-room garb.
The whole process, from boxcar to six-pack, takes 21 days.
But the hardest part of running a modern brewery isn’t mixing up the beer, Richter said. It’s keeping the Lite separate from the Genuine Draft, keeping Milwaukee’s Best out of Lowenbrau’s way.
Managers keep track of the factory’s various products in the “cold service control room,” where a 50-foot electronic board gives plant managers a schematic view of everything that’s brewing in the plant.
“You’re managing a process that’s running at full tilt,” Richter said. “There are 150 tanks out there, and you’ve got to be sure that each is filled or emptied on schedule.”
Up to four years ago, Miller allowed its employees to guzzle beer right off the production line. Now, after some drunk-driving citations to brewery workers, the brewery is “dry.”
“We felt it was time to change the image of the industry as a whole,” Franco said. “Now, the only place where an employee can legally taste beer is right here,” Franco said, indicating a room where the plant’s official tasters can test samples from batches of beer to ensure that standards are maintained.
When it comes to talking about what goes on behind those locked gates, Miller may be low profile and closemouthed. But the company is known among its municipal and corporate neighbors for its willingness to play hardball to protect its interests.
The brewery, one of Irwindale’s two top revenue generators (the other is Home Savings of America) was enticed away from Azusa in 1977, after Irwindale’s redevelopment agency offered the current site to the brewery for $1.
But in recent years, the company has won reductions in county property assessments, substantially reducing its annual property tax contribution of about $2 million to the city, said Irwindale Finance Director Abe DeDios. “We lost $762,000 a year in one shot,” DeDios said ruefully.
And there has been no reluctance by the company to speak out when it comes to Miller’s water supply. A subsidiary of Philip Morris Cos. Inc., Miller was a feisty, outspoken leader in fights to stop both a proposed waste-to-energy plant on a site across the Foothill Freeway and the expansion of the Azusa landfill into an adjacent gravel quarry.
Both of those were threats to water quality, Miller representatives said. Financing problems killed the waste plant, but the Azusa landfill recently was given the go-ahead by a Superior Court judge.
And one source close to the negotiations said that Miller, fearful that competitor Anheuser-Busch would outbid it for advertising and concession rights for the stadium, helped scotch the proposal to move the Los Angeles Raiders to Irwindale. The company stalled on an Irwindale request that it chip in some front money, the source said, and the deal lost momentum and eventually died.
Not so, said Michael McAndrews, managing partner of the law firm of McKenna, Conner & Cunio, which represents Miller. “I don’t know that the discussions ever got to the point where we were given something to decide upon,” he said.
But beer making is a tough and difficult business, Richter said. Despite the introduction of computers, brewing must be practiced by skilled, unsentimental people with a certainty about what they’re doing, he said.
“It’s like the old story of the surveyor whose client asked him to itemize a bill for $100,” Richter said with a wry smile. “The surveyor came back and said, ‘It’s $3 for the stakes and $97 for knowing where to put them.”’
