“This is the most modern brewery in the country,” František Holý, warehouse manager for Plzeňské Prazdroje, told Práv. Dragos Constantinescu, CEO of Japanese company Asahi, describes the new workplace as a technological marvel.
“At the Asahi Group, we are the first in Europe to have an automated warehouse,” said Constantinescu, adding that this was Prazdroj’s biggest investment since 2006.
Construction started in July 2021. “Technology installation started a year ago, and since September they have been perfecting, testing and getting started,” recalls Holý.
The building, which was built on the site of the demolished production hall, occupies an area of ten thousand square meters, four thousand of which is a thirty-meter-tall eleven-floor self-supporting shelving system. It can accommodate 16,000 pallets, which is about 18 million beers, and is serviced by ten loader cranes, which bring pallets with bottles or cans of beer to the so-called gondolas – there are twenty-eight of them, each carrying two pallets. At a speed of seven kilometers, they are transported along six hundred meters of rail to a conveyor, and from there the beer battery heads to one of the twelve gates through which the trucks pass.
“We can fill nine of them in one hour, equivalent to 290 pallets,” explains Holý.
Gondola transport pallets loaded with cases of beer onto roller conveyors.
You won’t find many employees here, only two directly in the warehouse. “The shift foreman and one staff member. If it is a classic warehouse, we need another 56 workers,” said Holý.
They also considered this possibility a few years ago at the brewery. “However, a conventional warehouse will have a building area of fifty percent larger. There is also the possibility of external warehouses, but that will significantly increase the demand for trucking,” explains Holý.
Neither the sun nor the rain helped
The brewery began building the new warehouse as roughly a third of the old one will be used by a planned new bottling line for returnable glass bottles – it should start operating by the end of this year. The total storage capacity at the Pilsen factory now stands at 42,000 pallets.
There are photovoltaic panels on the roof of the new building, which cover up to 30 percent of the warehouse’s electricity consumption. And under the building there is a rainwater tank with a total capacity of 838 cubic meters. “We will use it to cool production technology in neighboring Gambrinus,” concluded Dragos Constantinescu.
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