The Importance of Choosing the Right Brewery Flooring

The craft beer industry has grown significantly in recent years, with 8,884 craft breweries operating in the U.S. in 2020. To stay competitive, it’s essential to ensure cleanliness and safety by installing the proper brewery flooring for your facility.

Back of the House

The back of the house is the heart of the brewery, where you spend time perfecting your brewing process and producing unique beer flavors to attract your customers. But creating beer requires hot liquids, yeast, and other ingredients that can wind up on the floor, posing a safety risk for those working on the product.

Your back of the house floors must withstand spills, moisture, cleaning chemicals, hot water, and regular wear and tear from foot and wheeled traffic. Poor flooring can lead to gaps or cracks that leave the brewery vulnerable to safety hazards, like bacterial growth and contamination. You need non-porous, anti-slip, easy-to-clean floors in order to keep your brewery running.

Seamless floors are a good option because they are easy to clean. There isn’t any space for dirt to accumulate or bacteria to hide and grow, so cleaning is fast and maintenance is easy. A high-quality floor will also withstand cleaning chemicals, acids, or hot water washdowns, which cause rapid temperature changes that can result in thermal shock.

Your brewery flooring should also prevent the pooling of water, which can lead to bacterial growth and slip-fall hazards. It can even cause the failure of FDA/3rd party audits. Installing a high-performance slip-resistant brew floor can save time and money, and prevent headaches down the road.

Your flooring should be properly sloped to enable liquids to drain, regardless of the size or shape of your commercial drain. Ask your flooring installer to provide references that demonstrate their experience with operations and drain covers similar to yours.

Finally, you’ll want to make sure the floor is slip-resistant in order to keep employees, customers, and touring patrons safe. Slip resistance is achieved with texture, floors with higher levels of texture are more difficult to clean. A flooring expert will be able to help you choose an appropriate level of texture for the different areas of your brewery.

Front of the House

The front area of the brewery may not require as heavy-duty a floor coating as the back of the house. However, facilities still require anti-slip, easy-to-clean flooring. You may have a tasting floor in this space, and spills are bound to happen. A good option for this is decorative epoxy flooring because it allows for the use of different colors, patterns, finishes, and even your brewery’s logo. A decorative epoxy offers options for branding while maintaining safety and compliance.

Case Study: Field Brewing

Surface Solutions installed flooring for Field Brewing in Westfield, Indiana. For this project, we used Ucrete flooring, which can be installed quickly with minimal drying and curing time. This type of flooring has a higher resin content that does not need an additional sealer coat, which can wear away over time, leaving a floor porous and unprotected. Ucrete resists physical abuse, moisture, bacterial growth, and a wide range of aggressive chemicals. It outperforms traditional epoxy flooring surfaces in both impact resistance from heavy traffic and the ability to withstand thermal shock.

Our industrial flooring specialists installed a 1,800 square-foot application of Ucrete UD200. They also installed 250 linear feet of 2-inch and 45-degree wedge cant cove base with Ucrete RG, which is ideal for verticle surfaces. On top of this strong and durable floor, Field Brewing runs a brewhouse, cooling room, serving bar, and gastropub, offering locally-prepared food and beverages. We completed the installation in just two days.

About Surface Solutions

For more information about installing the right flooring in your brewery, connect with Surface Solutions, Inc. We’ve been a Ucrete Master Contractor since 2012 and are a leading provider of top-quality flooring for the food and beverage industry. From testing and consultation through installation, Surface Solutions is your premier source for non-toxic, safe, and environmentally friendly flooring. We offer turnkey installations using in-house personnel only. Contact Surface Solutions today to learn more about how we can help provide the highest quality industrial flooring solutions for your business.

Originally published December 4, 2020; updated September 21, 2021