The Millstream Brewery bottles once a week usually on a Thursday. Approximately 600 to 700 cases of beer are bottled during a typical bottling run. The run starts at 8:30 am and usually finishes around 3:00 p.m. It takes about five employees to bottle.

The bottling operation can be viewed through the windows in the Hospitality room at the brewery. It is recommended that you call in advance to confirm the bottling day for the week if you want to view the process. Brewery phone number: 1-319-622-3672.

The empty bottles are first placed on to a conveyor belt by hand using a device that picks up eight bottles at a time. They are then funneled down into a single line and pushed towards the sanitizer.

The bottles are sprayed with an iodine solution as they enter the sanitizer. They are then turned upside down and a high pressure sprayer rinses the bottles with sterile water. The bottles then corkscrew through the hand fabricated sanitizer, acquired from a Heilman brewery, as they next make their way to the filler.

The bottles are raised up onto the filler needle and filled as they turn on the filler. The filler is a twenty-four head unit.

After filling, the bottles make their way to the crowner. A very fine stream of water is squirted across the bottle immediately prior to capping. This causes the beer to foam up and pushes all the air out of the bottle.

The bottles are then pushed on through a sterile water washer. This wash simply rinses the beer that foamed over from the capping. After being rinsed, the bottles pass through an air-knife to blow the water off the bottles. The rinse and air-knife provides a clean surface for the label to be applied.

Next comes the labeling of the bottle. The label is applied using a bottle labeler acquired from an Anheuser-Busch brewery in Texas.

The final step in the bottling process is a personal, visual inspection and hand packing of all the beers and root beer into the six-pack, twelve-pack and case boxes.