No one would ever design a brewery this way. You climb over roofs and through buildings to get from one spot to another. At one point, you're almost touching the packaging lines, but a few steps later, you're standing next to a 1,000-barrel brewing vessel.

You would certainly never build a brewery this way from the ground up. But you're constrained by the physical footprint of a brewery that dates to the 1870s.

Within the bones of the state's oldest brewery, a state-of-the-art brewery nears completion. The Genesee Brewery is close to finishing up the first phase of its $49.1 million eco-brewery modernization plan. The first phase, originally slated for $40 million, has already cost $45 million, company officials said.

The brewery's new 13,000-square-foot cold block is the final piece in the first phase of the plan. It should be online and operational by mid-February, brewery officials said. Mechanical construction should be completed by Christmas. Electrical construction to follow shortly after. The new hot side of the brewery is already functional.

"The old brewery was really designed for those core recipes (Genesee, Genesee Light, and Genesee Cream)," said Genesee assistant brewmaster Steve Kaplan. "We were able to make some of the modern craft styles, IPAs, pale ales, or big imperial stouts. We can make them on the old equipment, but the efficiency wasn't great. The beers are good, but we want them to be better. We designed the new brewery in this old footprint, to be able to produce the whole spectrum of what we want to produce.

"For us, it's almost a chance to start over. But we're still able to produce the core recipes, the same way we always did."

When completed, the brewery will be even more efficient. Currently, Genny has the capability to produce 206,000 24-count cases of beer per day. The new brewery, while half the size, has the potential to be twice as productive.

Kaplan, who oversees the hot side of the brewing process, and Mark Fabrizio, North American Breweries director of project management and continuous improvement, gave the Democrat and Chronicle an exclusive first look at the modernized equipment and facilities at the brewery's 17-acre campus on St. Paul Street.

The first thing that visitors are struck by upon entering the brewhouse is how bright and shiny — and tall — everything is. The mash vessels alone are three stories high. This is one-half of the heart of the new brewery, the hot side, and the first part of the brewing process was pumping along.

“This allows us to get a lot more out of the raw materials we put into the system,” Kaplan said. “It’s huge for cost-savings. And for us, it’s much, much higher quality.

"It's pretty much the state of the industry. But it's a big step forward for us."

For now, Genesee said it is focusing on completing the first phase of the modernization project. The start date for the second phase, which focuses on the Genesee Brew House, is unknown. The company hopes to add a Rochester beer museum, education center, and meeting space.

Genny was promised $9.5 million in state funding, including a $5 million capital grant through the Upstate Revitalization Initiative, to expand and renovate the Brew House. The state money is tied to Genny's promise to create 128 new jobs, half of which will go to people living in poverty. The brewery currently employs about 600 people.

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The lauter tun system, which Kaplan compares to a massively oversized drip coffee maker, was designed to produce the three flagship beers. These beers rely heavily on adjuncts — for example, corn or rice — and the system was constructed to aid in brewing 1,000 barrel batches of the beer. (Most Rochester-area breweries won't even produce 1,000 barrels of beer in a year.)

Kaplan, who has been with Genny for eight years, said the new brewhouse produces the "best-tasting wort" he has ever tried. Wort, basically the lifeblood of beer, is the liquid taken from the mashing process that contains the sugars that will ultimately be fermented by yeast to make alcohol.

The eco-friendly brewing system includes updates to systems for hopping, mashing, milling, and yeast handling. Much of the equipment is designed to reduce waste and water usage, company officials said.

Over the past three years, Genny has decreased water usage by 176 million gallons, officials said. That's without the new system in place. Genny, which is still Monroe County's largest water consumer, expects that number to continue to decrease. And all the water used is recovered.

Fabrizio said Genny is projecting a 13 million gallon water savings for the next year.

There are 24 new fermenters of varying sizes. The tanks hold anywhere from 500 to 2,000 barrels and include the 12 tanks that were transported from Albany via the Erie Canal earlier this year.

They've got the wort, they have the yeast, it's time to ferment the beer, which brings up additional expansion and the soon-to-be 13,000-square-foot cold block.

Assistant brewmaster Matt James, who has been with Genny for 22 years and "pretty much designed" the yeast propagation system, oversees the next next piece of the process.

The star of this process is the yeast, and Genny uses different strains for almost every beer it produces. Genny said it uses about 7-10 generations of each yeast strain before it starts anew. By keeping the generation numbers low, the fermentation is predictable and consistent.

It takes about 36 to 48 hours to grow enough yeast to brew a 1,000-barrel batch. From start to packaging, a batch of Genny beer takes 18 to 20 days to produce.

It's when the process reaches that cold block that the public can begin to enjoy Genny beer because the cold block features large windows to allow viewing of his portion of the brewing process. That's a stark contrast to the closed and cloistered brewery of the past. Looking up, the cold block features an intricate maze of piping, something that required months of planning to lay out and construct. The cold block also features an automated control room, a new centrifuge, and three clean-in-place systems (to clean vessels and lines).

Fabrizio said the piping connects the brewhouse to the cold block to the cylindrical-conical fermentation tanks (the ones that traveled down the Erie Canal in May). He points out the new dry-hopping vessel, which leads to a more pungent nose, especially for hoppy beers. It is capable of holding 2,000 pounds of hops, Fabrizio said.

Every portion of the design is modular. There is room for Genny to grow. Walls can be pushed out and new modules can easily be added. Kaplan said they could add a second filter train.

"It was more than just the project you see today," he said. "It was looking at potentially what we could grow into and where we needed to be in the future. There are no plans for any of that yet. If the sales grow, we can grow with it. Not yet. We still have a lot of work to do."

Genesee will be able to produce a larger variety of beers more quickly. As the Genesee Brew House and the scaled-up recipes that have been released as 500-barrel Pilot Batch Series beers have shown, consumers enjoy variety. How many breweries sell products that range from $15 per case to $70 per case? Genny prides itself on producing beer for every segment of the beer-drinking public.

"The fact that everyone in Rochester is making good craft beer right now, it's really helped us," Kaplan said. "It can't be said enough, if all of the local breweries are making good beer, that means people are drinking beer. We're benefiting from those guys succeeding.

"If we can keep people interested in beer, it helps us all."

Genny has helped itself with the renovation and rebuild, especially with the new control room. Kaplan called it, "hitting the 'go' button."

All of the stages of the brewing process can be managed from control rooms in each part of the brewery. Processes such as hop dosing are fully integrated through new systems and the control room. There are three hop dosing vessels. Each of the vessels can hold 440 pounds of hops, Kaplan said.

The hot-side control system oversees everything from grain milling to wort cooling. Once the cold block goes online, it will extend to fermentation, filtration, and "basically everything up to packaging release," Kaplan said.

Most notable is that Genny can make changes mid-mash. Every future batch of that same beer from then on will follow the exact specifications. "We have more control over the process now," Kaplan said.

"We're letting the computer do all the repetitive stuff, but the operators now get to watch the process closely and figure out how we can make it better, how we can save money. It's more hands-on now, just in a different way."

Arthur Bryant and Mike Brown, kettlemen (control-room operators) in the hot side of the brewery, said the transition, which started in September, has been about learning as they go. "Guys were running just one little piece of equipment three months ago," Kaplan said. "Now, they are running the whole hot side of the brewery from one station."

“I’m learning again,” said Bryant, who has been with Genny for 18 years. “I’m glad to be here. We’re on the ground floor. Everything is changing."

“Out with the old and in with the new,” said Brown, who has been at Genny for six years, including the last three in brewing. “We’re having fun. I’m glad to be a part of it.”

No one would ever design a brewery this way. The old is juxtaposed with the new. But the folks at Genesee have figured out how to turn the state's oldest brewery into the most modern one.

WCLEVELAND@Gannett.com

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