Riding the Rails
Transportation is an even bigger issue for Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico, CA, the nation’s second largest craft brewer with 780,000 barrels sold last year. Sierra Nevada ships to all 50 states. Before it’s loaded onto the truck, the brewery’s flagship pale ale is prepped for a journey that can take as long as a week to go cross-country to an East Coast distributor, then another 3-4 weeks before it winds up at the retailer. It sits for six days in a brewery warehouse while the yeast naturally carbonates the beer. Then it’s hoisted unto refrigerated trucks that maintain the temperature between 42 and 49 degrees.
Unpasteurized and only roughly filtered, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale contains more malt and hops per cubic unit than mass-market beers, which means more ingredients that can break down at improper temperatures, Whitney explains. Refrigeration, he maintains, is “more essential” for craft beers than for pasteurized mass-market lagers from Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors, which in recent years have relaxed their requirements that their beers be kept refrigerated every step of the way from brewery to point of sale. (These beers are kept instead in “temperature-controlled” areas where the mercury can rise up to sixty degrees.)
About half of all Sierra Nevada shipped to the East Coast rides the rails. Sending beer by train “is a little more sustainable,” notes Whitney. “It doesn’t use as much fossil fuel.” The drawback is that trains “don’t go everywhere—only to the major hubs.” The beer then has to be transferred to a truck for the final leg of the journey, which can add a week to ten days to the travel time if the beer, for instance, is bound for Birmingham rather than Boston.
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale has a shelf life of 150 days, so a journey of about a month from brewery loading dock to your refrigerator does cut significantly into the beer’s window of salability. (It’s little wonder that many imports, facing a trans-oceanic voyage, are freshness-dated a full year from bottling.)
Given the length and breadth of this country, it’s amazing that drinkers on the East and West Coasts (and let’s not forget the Heartland) can enjoy one another’s beers at near-peak freshness. It’s worth raising a toast to the pipeline that delivers so effectively.
