Russell Brewing Company

As their sales volumes increased over the years, the operations crew at Russell began finding it difficult to keep up with the demand for their product. At the heart of the brewing process is the steam boiler, which provides heat for all of the brewing kettles. Like many emerging craft brewers in BC, Russell started out with a basic, inexpensive cast iron atmospheric boiler. Although the original boiler certainly helped to establish Russell as a well-respected brewery, reliability issues starting popping up over the years which eventually had General Manager Steve Schafer referring to himself as a “boiler babysitter”, where he often found his valuable time being spent with the boiler rather than focusing his attention on creating Canada’s next greatest IPA. When the downtime and repairs became too disruptive, Steve decided it was time to retire the old boiler and upgrade to a setup that could keep up with the growth of the company and pace of production.

Raven Supply and Chapman Burner, both avid fans of Russell beer, eagerly stepped in to help Steve transform his steam plant to the standard of a world-class craft brewery. The old, leaking cast iron boiler was replaced with a new industrial Bryan flex-tube with nearly double the capacity to serve both the existing kettles and their new plant expansion. The boiler was fitted with a Weishaupt linkage-less modulating burner which greatly increased their efficiency while delivering consistent, accurate steam pressure – an important factor in achieving repeatable quality in the beers that they produce.