ABITA SPRINGS, La. (WGNO) – Ever wonder how a beer is born? Well, I did too, so I went to our state’s largest craft brewery, Abita Brewing Company in Abita Springs, and they showed me how they produce 151,000 barrels of beer yearly. Spoiler alert: It all starts the same way.

Every beer that we now know and love was conceived by the same process. A brewer pitches a recipe to the brewmaster, and once it’s approved it goes through a series of testing it in a small batch. If it’s received well it then goes on to be mass produced, even then beers that don’t make it to distribution still end up in Abita’s on-site tap room so you can sample the experiments of Abita’s brewers.

Abita’s new facility is built for mass production. Jamie Jurado, Abita’s director of brewing operations, said the new brew house is one of the most energy-efficient brew houses in the world. The equipment is made in Germany, the world capital for beer.

It takes about eight hours to make what will then become beer in their state-of-the-art brew house, followed by eight days of cooling down and adding yeast. If you would like to see this process yourself, you can take a tour at Abita Wednesdays through Sundays.

When it comes to packaging the beer up and distributing it, they have the best equipment for that as well.

“450 bottles per minute go through our line. This is a nice state of the art German line,”  said Jurado.

That beer is then stored in a chilled warehouse before shipping and finding its way to a glass near you!