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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by AltonFan if you haven't already, see if you can get a copy of More Railroads You Can Model (red cover). One of the railroads depicted is the Milwaukee Road "Beer Line" that served a few breweries in Milwaukee. i would imagine in the old days, CO2 may have been brought in as solid cakes (dry ice perhaps) that would be dissolved in water tp release the CO2. But doesn't beer get its fizz from the fermentation process? [/quote] Yes, the yeast that devour the sugars in the wort produce alcohol and co2 gas. Brewers allow the fermentation to run its course then home-brewers add some more sugar to the living yeast and confine the mixture in heavy glass bottles. The yeast grows and produce CO2 to carbonate the bottle. Sometimes the bottles explode because of to much pressure. Exploding bottles are a bad thing for a commercial brewery. They don't like heavy bottles much eather, they cost to much to move. So to eliminate the exploding bottles they filter the beer, the filter is fine enough to remove the yeast and the little CO2 that is in the unpressurized beer. Then the beer is chilled and pressurized with CO2 and bottled. No yeast means that the pressure inside the bottle will not rise and no bottles, even light thin ones will explode. As I was typing this it dawned on me that there is no need to ship in CO2. The fermenting wort puts off huge amounts of it. All a brewery would need to do is harvest enough gas from this step in the process to pressurize the beer for bottling.
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