I got in an arguement with my friends today about Coors' bottling practices. Does Coors' brew the beer with the proper amount of water for the Brewing process only to remove the water for transportation to local bottling plants where the water is then re-added. Any help would be appriciated and any links too.
Dude, a little research on brewing goes a long way. You sort of have it right, except for this bit about "remove the water for transportation." What Coors does is brew a beer with a relatively high amount of malt - in other words, a high-gravity version of the beer - and after it's finished, it's sent to a bottling plant to be diluted prior to packaging. Pretty simple and straightforward stuff, really.
Any idea what the pre-packaged beer tastes like?
_Randal
No idea at all. There might be a Coors-brewed "malt liquor" product made from the stuff, but I have a standing rule against consuming American-made low-budget high-adjunct beer-like beverages packaged in 40-ounce bottles. Mostly because the vast majority of them taste like crap.
I don't know- I think he'd need quite a lot of research to find much info on high gravity brewing in the US. (IIRC, a thread here had more information than all the beer books on the shelf combined...).
What Coors does is brew a beer with a relatively
I think the first "public" disclosure of the use of high gravity brewing was when Michelob Light was sort of "rushed" onto the market, back when "light beer" really took off and A-B had no entry (and didn't want to canibalize Bud sales). They pretty much admitted that Michelob had been brewed as a high gravity product (due to a shortage of capacity at A-B) that was diluted at bottling for a while and they simply added a bit more water to make ML. And was why ML was much more caloric than other light products, since the dilution didn't really approach what "light beer" was.
and after it's finished, it's sent to a bottling plant
Coors is the ONLY brewer who ships their high gravity beer to an off-site "bottling plant", aren't they? All the other brewers who may use the technique do it to increase capacity, and bottle at an adjoining facility. Coors uses that Virginia facility to serve the East Coast and still be able to use the "Rocky Mountain Water" gimmick. I can't recall the whole story but I guess once they bought the Memphis brewery (Schlitz/Stroh) the idea of brewing in Virginia was dropped?
(Speaking of Schlitz, I seem to recall they did a similar thing when they still had a brewery in Hawaii. They shipped concentrated wort to Hawaii from their LA brewery to ferment and bottle as Primo.)
Pretty simple and straightforward
Simple but not well-known and it seems the orginal poster got it confused with the soda industry, where syrup is shipped to bottling plants around the world.
Bert Grant's autobiography touches on this; says he got a taste of the pre-water high-grav beer and thought it was the best Coors he'd ever had.
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