USA, VT: Trapp Lager Brewery expands

Though the new and improved Trapp Lager Brewery won't start rolling out new product until later this winter, this week marked a turning point for the project, sevendaysvt.com reported on October, 28.

This week, executive vice president Sam von Trapp — along with head brewer J.P. Williams and the rest of the Trapp brewing and construction teams — plans to open a hole in the new brewery's roof. Cranes will lower in a 50-barrel brewhouse boiler that, along with new fermenters and lagering tanks, will increase the brewery's production from 2,000 barrels annually to about 50,000 over the course of the next couple years.

Though the new brewhouse is crucial to amping up production, new storage and fermentation tanks are also crucial. German lagers ferment at cooler temperatures, often at half the speed of other beers, and they require weeks of rest in cold storage, called "lagering" (the word "lager" means "storage room" in German). So increasing production relies more on those tanks than on the initial brew itself. "It's a whole new brewery," von Trapp says. "A much larger, much more modern brewery with a much greater capacity."

"Right now we're focusing on getting the [beer] production going," von Trapp says. That means expanding the distribution of Trapp's flagship Helles, Vienna, Dunkel and Pilsner lagers — as well as its regular seasonals — into New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and getting the beers into cans and bottles for retail sale.

29 October, 2014