Anheuser-Busch operates 12 breweries around the United States. But many people are surprised to find that the newest among them is just 50 miles north of Atlanta in Cartersville.

The brewery, which opened in 1993, is hidden in plain sight, just off I-75 near Lake Allatoona, in a huge, industrial-size facility that employs about 600 people, who produce 8 million barrels of beer per year.

Bob Townsend (ENLARGE)

'We taste for about an hour every day,'says resident brewmaster Angelo Cayo (right) with assistant brewmaster Daniel Kahn. They're in the Anheuser-Busch brewery tasting room in Cartersville.

WORLD BEER CUP WINNERS When the World Beer Cup awards were presented on April 19 at the Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego, two Atlanta breweries were among the big winners. • Atlanta Brewing Co. took home a gold medal in the wood and barrel-aged beer category for its Red Brick Barrel Select and a bronze medal in the special bitter or best bitter category for its Numbers Ale. • Sweetwater Brewing Co. was awarded a silver medal in the American-style imperial stout category for its Happy Ending. BOB TOWNSEND BEER PICK E-mail Townsend Related: • More on food and drink • Restaurant reviews and search More Townsend [an error occurred while processing this directive] • Bob Townsend is editor of Southern Brew News, a bimonthly beer publication distributed throughout the Southeast.

Recently, I took a tour with resident brewmaster Angelo Cayo and assistant brewmaster Daniel Kahn, who led me through the Cartersville brewing operation. We started with a look at boxcars filled with malted barley and rice, walked all around the massive 10-story brewhouse and ended at the well-appointed tasting room, where we sampled a surprising array of beers.

Even if you're not a devotee of Budweiser or one of the other 20 or so brands Cayo and Kahn are responsible for making, you can't help but be impressed by the work they do there every day. Much of it involves quality control, which means tasting everything from the water to the wort to the finished beer.

"Certainly we're a business," Kahn says. "And that business has a science base and an art base. We're not so different from a small brewer. We just do it on a bigger scale and we have a few more tools to play with. That being said, our focus is to make sure that our beer flavor profile is correct. Our quality is quantifiable with technology and measures. But a lot of it is very subjective and sensory. And that's the art."

"We taste for about an hour every day," says Cayo. "Anything that's going to come in contact with the product, we inspect, and taste and smell. I even smell an empty glass before I pour beer into it. And when we make beers like our porter or pale ale, sometimes we'll go out and buy a bunch of different porters or pale ales from other breweries, just to see how we stack up."

Cayo started working for Anheuser-Busch in Tampa more than 25 years ago. He became an avid home-brewer around the same time.

"The day I started in Tampa, I really didn't know anything about brewing," Cayo says. "But I fell in love with the business, and I started learning everything I could about it. I started home-brewing because I wanted to try different styles and experiment with different yeast strains."

Kahn, who has been with Anheuser-Busch for 21 years, began studying chemical engineering at the University of California at Davis before becoming a home-brewer and switching to brewing science.

Cayo and Kahn are proud to point out that the Cartersville brewery has had a big part in making products in the Michelob Specialty series, which so far includes four all-malt beers — a pale ale, a Bavarian-style wheat, an Octoberfest-style marzen and a porter. Many of those beers were conceived at A-B's small research/pilot brewery in St. Louis.

"The brewing market has changed quite a bit since Michelob was introduced," Kahn says. "But we still feel that the Michelob brand represents something special.

"And working off that, it makes sense that some of the beers that we make that have a craft character would fall under the Michelob brand."

In the tasting room, Cayo and Kahn set up a special sampling of some new experimental beers from the pilot brewery. Among them, a tasty Irish Red ale, a solid American brown ale and, most astonishingly, a hoppy, high-gravity barley wine-style ale.

Cayo and Kahn are hoping to brew a dunkelweizen (Bavarian-style dark wheat beer) that's been in the works at another A-B brewery. But whatever comes next, they both agree that brewing has become a way of life for them.

"I think people really appreciate what we do, and that's a good feeling," Kahn says.

"I've never done anything else," says Cayo. "And it's all I want to continue to do. After all, not everybody can say that they get to taste beer at work every day."