Anheuser-Busch has a lot of breweries across the country because they brew a lot of beer. A lot of that beer goes to nearby distribution centers where it's stored while it waits to be loaded onto trucks and shipped to a store near you. My job is to build different tools and reports that show data about how fast the trucks are being loaded, how many mistakes are made while loading, etcetera, etcetera.
Since I'm doing so much work involving the distribution centers I thought it would be good to go visit the nearest one over in Granite City, IL. GRAN as we call it is the busiest of the distribution centers and handles a lot of the craft beer as well so the truck loads leaving here are the most complicated.
The Cold Room is where we store the keg beer because it needs to be kept refrigerated as it is not pasteurized.
Import keg beer on the other hand is pasteurized so that it can survive its boaty journey to America.
I'm always sad when I think about how much beer has to be thrown away. Beer that has passed its freshness date or stuff that gets damaged in shipping is marked as "dump beer" and gets shipped to a company that dumps the beer and recycles the packaging. I just learned that when A-B dumps beer it gets a refund on the excise taxes paid to the federal government. Very interesting.
I got to take home a case of fancy Goose Island Noel that was still good it just was out of season.
Best field trip ever.
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