UC Davis brewery, winery and foods facility aims for eco-excellence

Brewery, winery and foods facility aims for eco-excellence

By Pat Bailey

Think green — very green.
Green beer, green wine, green cheese and green tomatoes. No, we’re not talking about a new Dr. Seuss book or the menu for St. Patrick’s Day, rather the new UC Davis processing facility now under construction at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science.
The facility will include the August A. Busch III Brewing and Food Science Laboratory and the Teaching and Research Winery, which replaces the campus’s famous 1938-era cellar and winery.
The 34,000-square-foot facility, with walls just now being overlaid on its steel frame, is designed to meet LEED Platinum building and construction standards — the highest certification granted by the U.S. Green Building Council.
LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and has become the hallmark of sustainability in the architecture and construction world.
Icon for industry commitment
Supported completely by private, philanthropic donations, university officials say the one-story facility will be an icon for the commitment of these contributing industries and of UC Davis to a greener, more sustainable future.
The facility has been designed to complement the other three buildings of the Robert Mondavi Institute and is slated for completion in August.
It will house the world’s first LEED Platinum winery, first LEED Platinum brewery and first LEED Platinum food processing pilot plant and milk-processing lab has been designed to be the first LEED Platinum building on the UC Davis campus and only the third built by UC.
The other two are UC Davis’ Tahoe Center for the Environmental Sciences in Incline Village, Nev., and UC Santa Barbara’s Bren Hall.
“It will not only meet the highest environmental design and construction standards, it will go even further to demonstrate how environmentally responsible technologies can be incorporated into the daily operations of food and beverage processing facilities,” said enology professor Roger Boulton. He is the Stephen Sinclair Scott endowed chair in enology who specializes in the chemical and biochemical engineering aspects of winemaking.
A complex building
The new building, while not massive, will certainly be one of the most complex facilities on campus.
Shared by the Department of Viticulture and Enology and the Department of Food Science and Technology, it will comprise two attached wings.
The north wing will be the Teaching and Research Winery, and the south wing will be the August A. Busch III Brewing and Food Science Laboratory.
Although the building is fully funded, both departments are still in the process of raising funds to fully equip the new facility and to cover the cost of enhancements to meet LEED Platinum standards.
Winemaking: Principles and practices
‘The building will enable students to learn both the principles and the practical applications of sustainability; right now we can only teach them the principles.’

Andrew Waterhouse, viticulture and enology chair
The 12,500-square-foot winery will include a large experimental fermentation area with 152 200-liter research fermentation tanks and 14 2,000-liter fermentation tanks.
There are three controlled-temperature rooms, barrel and bottle cellars, an analytical lab, a classroom and a special bottle cellar for donated wines. The winery will be used for research and teaching and for courses for professionals.
“The building will enable students to learn both the principles and the practical applications of sustainability; right now we can only teach them the principles,” said wine chemist Andrew Waterhouse, chair of the Department of Viticulture and Enology and the Marvin Sands endowed chair in viticulture and enology.
Precision metering and control systems necessary for sustainable processing are also critical for moving winemaking to the next level of excellence, he stressed.
“Fine wines are the result of an intricate mix of environmental and processing factors,” Waterhouse said. “If we are to better understand how environmental factors, such as sunlight levels in the vineyard, impact the subtle aspects of wine quality, we need to be able to very precisely control the winemaking process. The new winery will equip us to do just that.”
The 11,500-square-foot brewing and food science lab will house a brewery, general food-processing pilot plant and a milk-processing laboratory.
Brewing as a complex, sophisticated process
“This new facility will allow us to showcase the importance of beer and brewing as a complex, sophisticated process as well as the important role that UC Davis plays in the brewing industry,” said Charlie Bamforth, Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Malting and Brewing in the Department of Food Science and Technology. He noted that equipment from the 1.5 barrel-capacity brewery, updated in 2006, will be moved from Cruess Hall to the new building this fall.
“The brewery is an authentic reduced-scale facility of a size comparable to many of the smaller commercial operations in the brewing sector,” Bamforth said.
“We hope that it will be a facility that can be used by commercial brewers and suppliers to test out new recipes or processes in small-scale batches,” he added.
‘The food processing industry in California contributed significantly to this facility, in part because of the need for research-driven innovations that can reduce this industry's use of water and energy, and make beneficial use of byproducts.’

James Seiber, food science and technology chair
Handling broad spectrum of foods
The general foods processing plant will handle a broad spectrum of food products, including tomatoes, olives and more.
“The food processing industry in California contributed significantly to this facility, in part because of the need for research-driven innovations that can reduce this industry's use of water and energy, and make beneficial use of byproducts,” said James Seiber, chair of the Department of Food Science and Technology.
“The new facility will provide a unique opportunity for faculty and students to partner with industry in exploring new technologies, emphasizing those that are sustainable from both food supply and environmental viewpoints,” Seiber said.
The facility’s milk processing laboratory is specially designed for cheese and other dairy products.
“One of the extraordinary features of the entire facility is that the general food-processing pilot plant and the milk processing laboratory are designed and constructed for food-grade and dairy-grade processing, respectively,” John Krochta, the Peter J. Shields Endowed Chair of Dairy Food Science in the Department of Food Science and Technology, who is overseeing the milk-processing laboratory.
“That means that we will actually be able to provide samples of the foods and milk-based products that are processed here for sensory or nutritional evaluation.”
Private funding
Obtaining funds for new university buildings can be a challenge, noted Clare Hasler, executive director of the Robert Mondavi Institute.
“Public construction funds ebb and flow with the state’s economic fortunes, and a specialized project such as this one would not be possible without donor support,” Hasler said. “Still, it is quite remarkable that the brewery, winery and foods facility has been totally funded by private donations.”
The first gift of $5 million came from Robert Mondavi in 2001, set aside in addition to other gifts that he and his wife Margrit had made to UC Davis. It was followed in 2002 by a $5 million pledge from the Anheuser-Busch Foundation for the brewery and foods lab. Other major donations were made by Ronald and Diane Miller, and the California tomato processing industry.
A group of winery partners led by Jess Jackson and his wife Barbara Banke of Kendall-Jackson Wines and Jerry Lohr of J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines provided the funds necessary to initiate or secure the $2.1 million needed to design and construct the facility for LEED platinum standards.
In all, more than 150 individuals, alumni, and corporate friends and foundations have contributed more than $20 million for the new facility.
On the home page: This rendering shows a grape’s eye view of the August A. Busch III Brewing and Food Science Laboratory and the Teaching and Research Winery when it is completed. (Graphic by Flad Architects)
“When we first started talking about making this a highly sustainable facility, some people thought these were harebrained ideas,” Boulton recalled, smiling. “But we are fortunate to work with encouraging and supportive people who saw the potential for this building.”
Pat Bailey, a senior public information representative in University Communications, writes about agriculture, nutrition and veterinary medicine.