At 25, A-B reflects on shifts in suds

FORT COLLINS – Twenty-five years after Anheuser-Busch InBev opened its Fort Collins brewery, the face of brewing, both inside the behemoth facility and out, is vastly different.

At the end of this month, the Budweiser plant closes the door on its silver anniversary year, with three expansions and the addition of 22 brands under its belt. In those 25 years, microbreweries have sprung up around the region, giving beer-drinkers more choices than ever and causing Budweiser to diversify its offerings to appeal to those whose thirst requires something heavier than Bud.

Sales of Bud Light and other light beers have decreased in recent quarters, and sales of more specialized brews are up, something of which A-B is aware and is addressing through the addition of new products that appeal to different palates.

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Kevin Fahrenkrog, general manager of the Fort Collins plant for the past five years and a 25-year veteran of Anheuser-Busch, points out that Bud Light is still the most popular beer in the world.

Bud Light was one of the original beers brewed at the Fort Collins plant, along with Budweiser and Michelob. Today, brands such as Natural Light, Shock Top and Goose Island have been added to the mix, with the Fort Collins brewery now making more than 25 products.

That product expansion has been the biggest change in the past 25 years, according to Fahrenkrog, a St. Louis native who got his start in Anheuser-Busch’s headquarters brewery, located in his hometown, right out of college.

With new products and advances in technology, as well as new consumer demands, the plant also has had to adopt different types of packaging, branching out from 12-ounce bottles and cans to an “astronomical” number of packaging types, according to Fahrenkrog.

The brewery’s six packaging lines, including the original lines from 1988, can fill 1,200 bottles per minute and 2,000 cans per minute, he said, and are manned by 20 people at a time, working in shifts day and night.

In 25 years, the 1.1-million-square-foot brewery has undergone three expansions, most recently in 2003, and has grown from a 6-million-barrel system to a 10-million-barrel system.

The beer makes its way from massive stainless-steel brew kettles to the bottling lines, which whir across the production floor to assemble cases of beer that are then stored in an adjacent warehouse until the finished product is collected by truck and train to be distributed to the Western region of the country.

Some 225 trucks and five trains leave the plant full of beer each day, headed for liquor stores and bars in 15 states, Fahrenkrog said.

In addition to production growth and changes, the past 25 years have brought corporate changes for Anheuser-Busch as well, with the biggest occurring in 2008 with the $52 million merger of A-B with Belgian brewer InBev.

Since the merger, employee ownership has become a bigger part of the corporate culture, according to Fahrenkrog, who came to Fort Collins in the same year as the merger, after serving at A-B’s Columbus, Ohio, facility as head brewer.

Employees’ input on process improvement became a bigger part of decision making, Fahrenkrog said, leading to the implementation of several initiatives, including Six Sigma, a set of manufacturing techniques developed by technology company Motorola nearly 30 years ago.

Six Sigma seeks to improve process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability. It creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization – “champions,” “black belts,” “green belts,” “yellow belts” – who are experts in various methods.

Implementing these processes has improved a variety of metrics at the brewery, Fahrenkrog said, most notably in resource use.

The plant has seen about a 35 percent reduction in water, fuel and electric use in the past five years, he said.

Employees and the company also now are more involved in the community, he said, including a partnership with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Earlier this year, the brewery held an event called Hammer & Ale, which raised $60,000 for Habitat’s next home project, Fahrenkrog said.

Anheuser-Busch doesn’t reveal employee numbers, Fahrenkrog said, but there’s no doubting the brewery’s impact on the labor force in the past 25 years.

Bringing the brewery to Fort Collins was a six-year economic development battle that began in 1982, according to Tom Clark, chief executive of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. and a former Northern Colorado economic development professional. Clark was on the front line of that battle, in which other cities were competing for the brewery, and many Fort Collins’ residents were fighting against it.

Anheuser-Busch employees are members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a storied institution once linked to organized crime, and many in Fort Collins were uneasy about the union’s presence here, Clark said. The matter eventually went to a vote in 1984, and the constituency approved a land annexation that led to the brewery’s construction.

The brewery also has helped attract and boost business for other companies in Northern Colorado. In 2005, glass bottle plant Owens-Illinois Inc. located in Great Western Industrial Park east of Windsor to edge out its competition in providing glass bottles to the brewing giant located just a short rail trip away in Fort Collins.

The Owens-Illinois plant manufactures more than 1 million amber-colored glass bottles per day, running 24 hours, seven days a week. More than 100 people are employed there, in well-paying jobs with a low turnover rate, according to Owens-Illinois.

Homegrown company American Eagle Distributing also has benefited from Anheuser Busch’s presence, delivering beer to some 1,100 customers throughout Northern Colorado.