On the malting floor the spring barley is spread out and soaked for two days. The grain then grows on the germination floor until the plumule breaks through. Next, the germinating malt is dried with hot air in a kiln, which halts growth, with the temperature and length of the process determining the malt’s colour.
After being crushed in a mill, the malt is then mashed with spring water, lautered and boiled with hops. The boiling determines the “original wort“ of the beer and therefore also its subsequent alcohol content. All these processes take place in the brewhouse, which houses the mash tun, mash pan, lauter tun and brewing copper. The end product from the brewhouse is called wort and is the preliminary stage of beer. It doesn’t yet contain alcohol but has all the ingredients – malt, hops and water.
After cooking the boiling wort is cooled to around 7 °C. Fine brewer’s yeast is then added to this cooled wort in the fermenting room. This ferments the malt sugar in the wort to alcohol and carbon dioxide in around seven days. At the end of the so-called tumultuous fermentation process in the fermentation room the young beer is pumped into the storage cellar. The yeast at the bottom of the tun can then be harvested and used up to a further eight times for fermentation. The 14 open tuns in the fermentation room have a capacity of around 250,000 litres.
During storage in the dark depths of the storage cellar the carbon dioxide content is determined by use of a bunging apparatus. The beer matures in taste and becomes steadily clearer as the yeast settles on the bottom of the tank. The Hofbräuhaus Traunstein’s storage tanks have a capacity of significantly more than one million litres. With this cycle repeated eight times per year, the storage cellar has an annual capacity of more than 5 million litres of beer. The long storage and maturation times of our beers allow their taste to fully develop.
Our beer is bottled in 20,000 bottles and 120 casks per hour so that it can be served fresh. With annual consumption standing at around 112 litres per capita in Germany, a bottling of over one million litres is sufficient for 8,928 people. The same amount of beer is enough to quench the thirst of some 7,246 Bavarians. In our bottling plant the quality of our beer is kept consistently high by stringent controls and the thorough cleaning of our returnable kegs and bottles. This is reflected in the aroma and taste of our beers and the strength of demand among beer lovers and connoisseurs.
Each of our original oak casks is a one-off piece from one of the last German coopers, the Munich-based firm Fass Schmid, and is filled by hand in the same way that it has been for hundreds of years.
