Pennsylvania brewery echoes Lynn odor problem

Lynn’s not the only city with a foul odor hanging over it this summer.The Garelick Farms bottling plant on the Lynnway earlier this summer was believed to be the source of a sour stench in the area, but after several improvements were made and the stench remained, officials are now considering other potential sources.Meanwhile, City Brewing Co. of Latobe, Pa. agreed to temporarily halt production at its bottling plant earlier this month at the request of municipal authorities and the state Department of Environmental Protection after complaints of a foul odor emanating from its facility.”The source of the odor is our sewage plant,” municipal manager Tom Gray said in a report published Wednesday, Aug. 4. “City Brewing’s involvement is that we believe their discharge is what is causing the odor.”Lynn city inspectors are presently searching for other sources of the noxious fumes, citing Garelick’s efforts to stymie the smell.”I’ve received a couple complaints and I don’t think it is Garelick,” Lynn Health Director Mary Ann O’Connor said last Friday. “They have put in place odor neutralizing systems including a spray system and humidifiers. We’ll monitor them and try to find the source of the other odor.”Lynn slapped Garelick with a nuisance abatement order and threatened $1,000 a day fines last week when the smell – not more than a month old – in the plant’s vicinity persisted despite efforts to restart the biological process used to treat the plant’s waste byproducts.Ironically, in its effort to combat the stench, Garelick added thousands of microbes provided by brewery giant Anheuser-Busch to its waste pre-treatment vat.The former Rolling Rock brewery, now owned and operated by LaCrosse, Wis.-based City Brewing, reopened for business after an eight-month hiatus at the end of July 2009, bottling about 15,000 cases of Iron City beer during each of its three around-the-clock shifts. The brewery employs about 125.The brewery also installed a canning line to increase production and added Arizona Iced Tea and Duquesne Beer to its product line. The authority and brewery officials believe the expanded product line, including some containing fructose and dextrose, may be responsible for the odor.”We don’t really know at this point. We know we did not have a problem with beer before,” Zack Mazzoni, the brewery’s controller, said.An examination Aug. 10 of the plant by municipal officials did little to pinpoint the cause of the odor.”We’re actually not 100 percent sure (the cause of the odor) was us,” Mazzoni said. “We haven’t found any concrete evidence to say it was or wasn’t us.”City manager Gray was more convinced. “No one’s 100 percent sure, but the percentages are really high,” he said.The company resumed plant operations shortly after the city’s examination, brewing beer and packaging beer products along with the installation of a $100,000 system with three holding tanks to isolate wastewater from products believed to be the cause of the smell and that wastewater is being hauled to a separate facility.The brewery has had engineering firms running tests to determine what type of waste-water treatment plant will be built on site. That plant is expected to be constructed by 2012.”That’s two years away,” Mazzoni said in published reports. “We want to stay in business and we don’t want to be terrible neighbors in the meantime.”