Brewery

A brewery or brewing company is a business that makes and sells beer. The place at which beer is commercially made is either called a brewery or a beerhouse, where distinct sets of brewing equipment are called plant. The commercial brewing of beer has taken place since at least 2500 BC; in ancient Mesopotamia, brewers derived social sanction and divine protection from the goddess Ninkasi. Brewing was initially a cottage industry, with production taking place at home; by the ninth century monasteries and farms would produce beer on a larger scale, selling the excess; and by the eleventh and twelfth centuries larger, dedicated breweries with eight to ten workers were being built.

The diversity of size in breweries is matched by the diversity of processes, degrees of automation, and kinds of beer produced in breweries. A brewery is typically divided into distinct sections, with each section reserved for one part of the brewing process.

History

Beer may have been known in Neolithic Europe and was mainly brewed on a domestic scale. In some form, it can be traced back almost 5000 years to Mesopotamian writings describing daily rations of beer and bread to workers. Before the rise of production breweries, the production of beer took place at home and was the domain of women, as baking and brewing were seen as "women's work".

Lagunitas Brewing Company

The Lagunitas Brewing Company is a brewery founded in 1993 in Lagunitas, California, The company is half-owned by Heineken International. The brewery is known for iconoclastic interpretations of traditional beer styles, and irreverent descriptive text and stories on its packaging. The company was the fifth top selling craft brewery in the US in 2014.

History

The brewery was founded in 1993 by Tony Magee in Lagunitas, California and moved a year later to nearby Petaluma, California when they quickly outgrew their original rural West Marin location.

Since the mid-2000s, Lagunitas has been one of the fastest-growing craft breweries in the United States, increasing from 27,000 barrels in 2004 to 106,000 barrels in 2010. In March of 2011, the company had 92 employees with distribution in 32 states. The brewery announced a $9.5 million expansion slated to begin early 2012 which increased its brewing capacity to 600,000 barrels.

On April 9, 2012, Lagunitas announced plans for a new Chicago-based brewery equipped with a 250 barrel brew house which will also have a 600,000 barrel capacity. In May 2012 it was announced that owner Tony Magee had signed a lease for a location in the city's Douglas Park neighborhood in North Lawndale, "that will put him in a space owned by film studio Cinespace...for at least 20 years." The Chicago brewery started producing beer on April 18, 2014, and opened an on-premises taproom a few months thereafter. A third brewery is being built in Azusa CA to be in full production by spring of 2017. This brewery will have an ultimate productive brewing capacity of 1,900,000 barrels.