The Hall & Woodhouse Badger brewery team kept a keen eye on 16 beer tanks as they were inched into position by cranes over the Blandford brewery site, completing another important milestone in the new brewery development programme.
On Thursday 10 July, the slow process began as a crane, manned by King Lifting and overseen by Musk Engineering, the British designers of the specialist brewing equipment, was moved into place to lift the massive tanks into their new brewery locations. By Friday all 16 tanks had been lifted and positioned, one of them into the existing fermentation building and 15 of them in the ‘tank farm extension’.
Head brewer Toby Heasman watched with great interest: “The new tanks are different sizes, holding between 15,000 and 50,000 litres each. They will be used for the fermentation and maturation of Badger ales and this is another important stage of the journey of moving from the old brewery to the new one. As head brewer this is a very satisfying part of the process as it’s not often a brewer gets to take delivery of 16 vessels in one day. Watching the contractors inch the vessels into place was quite something, with the crane extended to full length. The lifting team certainly earned its beer money!”
In the next two weeks, there will be more developments as the wall and roof cladding is completed. Greendale, the building contractor, has also started to pour the concrete foundations for the new packaging hall which will then be completed with a new steel framed building.
