It starts with a strong foundation and a beautiful brewery floor

In West Virginia I know who has my vote for the most beautiful brewery floor. I totally geeked out over the new production brewery floor installed at Big Timber Brewing Company in Elkins. In its own way, it’s a thing of beauty. 

Big Timber honchos Sam Mauzy and Matt Kwasniewski don’t mess around when it comes to building a solid foundation. They bought an old building and completely tore out the original concrete floor in the 5,400 sq. ft. area they will use for the production brewery.

They dug out many cubic yards of dirt and laid new drains and utilities. Then they spread in tons and tons of gravel, built forms for a floor drain, poured thousands of dollars of concrete and let it cure.

Urethane mortar makes beautiful brewery floor

Their pièce de résistance, however, was the icing on the cake, or in this case. the urethane mortar on the floor. Urethane mortar is an extremely durable top coating material perfect for the most demanding food and beverage processing areas. It is troweled onto the finished concrete about one-quarter rich thick. Bonding tightly to the surface, it has exceptional mechanical and thermal shock resistance.

It offers enhanced resistance to impact and abuse from dropped steel containers, parts and utensils such as you will expereince in brewery operation. Urethane mortar floors are slip resistant even when wet due to a permanent hard-wearing aggregate mixed throughout the full thickness of the floor system.

Urethane mortar floors are more durable than the popular epoxy coated floors. Under hard use, urethane mortar has a life expectancy of 10 years.

Cleanliness is important in brewery operations, and this floor system excels at being cleanable and stain resistant. Might it be the perfect brewery floor?

While it’s not found yet in many small local breweries, urethane mortar is becoming popular in larger craft breweries. for instance, Goose Island and Devils Backbone have them.

With the rough exposed brick walls rising up from the broad expanse of light gray floor, the brewery base is quite picturesque. It’s nice to see Big Timber putting its best floor forward. I can’t wait to see what all they put on top of that beautiful brewery floor when the new equipment arrives next year.

More information on Big Timber Brewery