Brewers Weigh In on Redhook Keg Explosion (UPDATE)

Of the 12 brewers, microbrewery owners, beer distributors and industry experts interviewed by Foster’s Daily Democrat in the past month — including employees of Smuttynose Brewing Company in Portsmouth, Otter Creek Brewing in Vermont, Shipyard Brewing Company in Portland, Maine, and Tuckerman Brewing Co. in Conway, N.H. — none could recall another instance of a keg exploding inside a brewery.

The incident has also raised eyebrows in the brewing community because Redhook officials said it involved a plastic keg, rather than a traditional stainless steel keg — the industry standard for several decades.

Craft Brew Alliance, Inc., which owns Redhook, has released little other information about the circumstances of the industrial accident, indicating that further details will be released at the conclusion of a full investigation.

Ted Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said an investigation has been launched into the accident, but declined to discuss the inquiry while the process is ongoing. He said it’s still too early to estimate when it will conclude.  Full details here. 

And HERE from NPR:

OSHA’s online database of brewery accident investigations covers 2001–2009. The agency looked into 18 serious accidents or fatalities during that period. The number goes down to 15 once you remove incidents where underlying health conditions caused or significantly added to the problem. Most serious accidents and fatalities during that time also happened at large breweries, particularly Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors facilities. Craft breweries–comparable to Redhook–only represent about a third of these accidents. The OSHA database doesn’t lump all manufacturing accidents into one category, so it’s hard to compare raw investigation numbers of breweries and all other manufacturing. But a quick search for “machinist” shows 366 OSHA investigations of deaths or catastrophic accidents over a 26 year period. That’s an average of about 14 major OSHA investigations a year for machining accidents, compared to only about two a year for breweries.