Brewery Equipment Fabrication in Chico, California

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has operated in Chico since 1980 and now ranks as the second-largest craft brewing company in the United States on the Brewers Association's most recent Top 50, with roughly a thousand employees. A brewery at that scale is not a taproom with tanks — it is continuous-process food and beverage manufacturing with its own wastewater treatment, packaging lines, cooperage, rail access, and a maintenance department that thinks like a plant's.

Around it, Butte County runs a serious agricultural processing economy — about $589 million in total agricultural value in 2024, with walnuts taking the top spot for the first time at roughly $150 million, almonds close behind near $122 million, and rice third around $118 million. The value-added work — hulling, shelling, drying, milling, and packaging — happens in facilities scattered along the Highway 99 and Highway 32 corridors and out into the county on the roads between the orchards. Chico itself hosts real processing infrastructure, including operations like the Shasta Vista Almond Huller and the Butte Creek Rice Dryer. Rice drying and milling in particular is an equipment-heavy, dust-heavy business with a hard seasonal calendar.

Combustible dust is a design input, not a housekeeping issue. Almond hulling and shelling, rice milling, and grain handling all generate dust that will deflagrate given an ignition source, oxygen, and suspension — which is why agricultural processing facilities are governed by dust-specific fire-protection standards, including NFPA 61 for agricultural and food processing and the broader combustible-dust guidance in NFPA 652. For a fabricator that has three concrete consequences. Dust collection has to be designed as a fire-protection system, meaning explosion relief, isolation, ducting routing, and collector siting are engineering decisions rather than ventilation preferences. Structures inside a dust environment need surfaces that do not accumulate dust — flat tops, ledges, and horizontal flanges are liabilities, and detailing them out is a design choice we make deliberately. And hot work in these facilities is a permit-and-procedure matter with real teeth: welding or grinding near a huller during season is frequently prohibited, so we plan bolted connections and off-season hot work rather than assuming we can cut in place. Confirm the applicable standards and your facility's requirements with your fire protection engineer and authority having jurisdiction.

Brewery cellars accumulate carbon dioxide, and CO2 is heavier than air. Fermentation produces it continuously, it pools in low areas, pits, and tank enclosures, and it displaces oxygen without any smell or visual warning. Work in and around a cellar means monitoring, ventilation, and often permit-required confined space procedures for tank interiors, trenches, and pits. It also shapes the steel: access platforms should not create unventilated pockets, and the layout should give an operator an escape route rather than a dead end. We treat CO2 as a design consideration in cellar access work, not only as a safety briefing item. Confirm your facility's confined-space program and monitoring requirements before any tank-interior scope.

Dust collection and air handling → — Ducting, hoods, and support steel routed through an operating facility. The most directly relevant portfolio item for Butte County's hulling, milling, and grain handling operations.

Custom barrel handler → — Barrel handling equipment built to a specific cellar's rack geometry and forklift. The same problem a brewery has with barrels, kegs, and totes.