Granite City open and brewing

Granite City Food and Brewery opened earlier this week at 3908 Coldwater Road in front of the Target store.

Many Fort Wayne area residents have already sampled the store; the management reported a steady flow of customers both lunch and evening traffic. 

The FWOb photo shows the stainless steel fermentation vessels visible from the bar area of the restaurant.  Granite City has a  patent on its brewing process.  The initial part of the brewing process takes place in Iowa.  The wort is then trucked to the individual store locations where the remainder of the brewing process takes place.

The process is done to ensure freshness with a consistency of product across all locations.

The name of the patented process is "Fermentus Interruptus."  And, no, FWOb is not making that up.

The weblog St. Louis Hops featured an interview which explains the Granite City way:

STL Hops: Can you quickly explain how the Fermentus Interruptus process works?
[Larry Case of Granite City]: Granite City’s business model for beer production is designed for flavor consistency and attractive financial leverage across a multi-unit restaurant concept. We are a restaurant with a microbrewery. A centralized brewery for wort production gives us the opportunity to consistently control the flavor inputs of the brewing cycle. We also remove from the restaurants both the capital cost of brewing equipment and the square footage cost of a manufacturing facility.

We then ship the wort in a customized tank truck to each location. After off-loading into fermenters we pitch yeast and finish the production cycle through fermentation, maturation, and filtering.

Shipping wort instead of finished beer allows us to avoid the complex legal hurdles of shipping alcohol across state lines.

STL Hops: How does the wort arrive at the stores?
LC: The wort is shipped in a straight tanker truck. Our trucks have a series of 4 or 6 individual pods (all insulated) at 400 gal each. This set-up lets us ship multiple styles of beer to multiple locations in one trip. We use hoses and a pump at each restaurant to transfer the beer from the truck into the fermenters.

Photo credit: Fort Wayne Observed.

Comments

[Cathy Dee]

Does anyone know how welcome kids are at Granite City?

[Mike Sweeney]

Absolutely welcome. It's a very family friendly place.