Kokanee Beer, and a few of its friends.

Some facts for my beer drinking net friends.

Crack yourself a cool one and read along.

Columbia Brewings 3 most popular brands.

• Kokanee, still the favourite for BC.
• Kootenay Ale, a true ale.
• Kokanee Gold, a premium draft only beer.

Lets check out the Brewhouse!

Mash Mixer

This is where the brewing process starts. Ground barley malt which has been received at the brewery as whole malt (and ground to standards by a six roll mill) is mixed with water and heated. Natural enzymes found in the malt reduce proteins and starches into smaller components. The end product is a sweet tasting mash that is then transferred to the Lauter Tun.

Lauter Tun

This is a large copper vessel that seperates the mash into two components, liquid and spent grains. This vessel has a slightly raised slotted floor to allow the sweet tasting amber coloured liquid called wort, to be collected by a series of run-off pipes. The wort then flows to the kettle. Hot water (called sparge) is sprayed over the top of the grain bed to extract all the fermentable wort from the grains, I have always thought that this is just like your basic coffee maker. The remaining spent grain is transferred to a holding tank to be sold as a high protein cattle feed.

Brew Kettle

Wort is collected and boiled in the Kettle. The boiling process mixes the wort and seperates out some proteins to ensure that the beer will stay bright and clear after bottling. Special varieties of hops are added to the Kettle. These hops are carefully selected to give KoKanee its unique flavour.

Each brew yields 8400 dozen bottles and we produce over 1500 brews each year.

Hot Wort Tank

This tank receives the boiled wort from the kettle. Here, hop sediment is settled out before the wort is pumped through the wort cooler to fermenting.

The Wort Cooler

The wort cooler is a large heat exchanger, simialar to a radiator. Cold water flows through alternating plates, while the hot wort flows through the opposite side reducing the temperature to 13.5 degrees from near boil. The water, now heated is reused in the brewing process.

Fermenting

Each fermenter is filled with wort, and yeast added. Yeast ferments the wort into beer, producing Carbon Dioxide, Alcohol and traditional beer flavours. This process takes six days to complete, after which time the beer is ready to be transferred to the aging tanks.

Centrifuge

The centrifuge removes the yeast from the beer as it is transferred to the aging tanks. The yeast is collected, stored and re-pitched into future brews.

Aging Tanks

The beer is transferred into these tanks from fermenting at a temperature of minus two degrees Celcius and stored for a minimum of fourteen days, allowing the beer to mature in flavour.

Beer Filter

This filter is composed of twenty two vertical stainless steel mesh screens. These screens are coated with a fine powder called celite which filters out any remaining yeast from the beer. This beer, now called bright beer, is transferred into racking (for Kegs) and bottling tanks to be packaged and shipped.

This is the basic layout of the Brewing Process. If you are interested in seeing the process for yourself, the Brewery has summer tours available daily.

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