New Belgium Brewing awarded GEA Brewery Systems, Kitzingen (Germany) the contract for the new brewhouse, cold process area, filtration and finishing systems of the brewery in Asheville.

Beer filling

So far, we’ve talked about how beer is produced. If we now go into our cellar, we should find finished, filtered beer ready for enjoyment. But that does not really help us because it’s our customers who want to have our beer. So we have to have some ideas of how we ship our beer to the customer. This is when we have to look at filling our finished beer.

Reduced temperature bottle washing goes into commercial operation

In commercial operations, bottle washers (BW) for returnable glass bottles are operated at temperatures sometimes well above 80 °C for safety reasons. Against a backdrop of rising energy prices, the question arises as to how far caustic temperature can be lowered, without sailing too close to the wind and causing problems in washing standards or in microbiology. Following pilot tests in the Fink Tec GmbH laboratory, appraisal tests have been carried out in bottle washer 1 at Stieglbrauerei zu Salzburg GmbH in Austria.

Beer fermentation

On a brewery tour, while accompanying people who are unfamiliar with brewing, one can sometimes hear the question in the brewhouse when looking at the wort in the lauter tun “Does this already contain alcohol?”. After a bit of chuckling, one gets back to business as usual, explaining fermentation and the associated formation of alcohol in a matter of about 5 minutes. In Brewing 101, this will take a bit longer but will be much more detailed.

Inaugurated by the Maltese President and blessed by the Archbishop, this major national, and European, event was also attended by the acting Prime Minister, leader of the Opposition party and a number of guests from overseas, including The Brewers of Europe.

The number one brewery in South Korea

In only 50 years, South Korea has transformed itself from an agrarian society into one of the world’s major industrialized nations. This high growth rate places it in the ranks of the East Asian tiger economies, beside Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Per capita gross income in South Korea is currently around 19 000 USD (13 365 EUR; 1960: 100 USD). Naturally, this torrid pace of development has resulted in altered consumer patterns, and consumption of alcoholic beverages is no exception. Beside the traditional alcoholic beverage soju, the consumers in the 1970s also began developing a taste for beer, which prior to that time had been virtually unaffordable. Oriental Brewery is one of the main beneficiaries of beer’s popularity. The company has recently succeeded in winning back significant market share, and it is now number one in the South Korean beer market. “The fine quality of our beer (along with an effective marketing strategy) was the prime contributor in our successful campaign to regain market leadership,” says Charles Park, Executive Director Oriental Brewery Company. “To maintain this level of product quality out into the future, we recently decided to make an additional investment in KHS filling technology and two KHS canning lines.”

The brewhouse – Part 2

In BRAUWELT International no. 3 2012, p. 135 ff., the unit operations of milling, mashing and wort preparation were covered; the unit operations of wort boiling, hot break separation and wort cooling are described in the present part.

A further Compact-Star™ designed for a medium-sized brewery was successfully commissioned at the brewery OOO Alpina in Abakan (Russian Federation). The 60 hl brewhouse entirely made of stainless steel consists of a mash tun kettle, a lauter tun equipped with Lauterstar™ technology, a Whirlpool/wort kettle with internal boiler and a condensate collection tank.

The brewhouse – Part 1

Many brewers regard the brewhouse as the “heart” of a brewery, some even refer to it affectionately as the “living room”. There is certainly some truth in this. As the brewhouse is a particularly complex section, it merits two articles in the context of this series as it is hardly feasible to describe all brewhouse processes in one article. In this first part, brewhouse operations up to and including wort preparation are covered. As usual, a glossary explains some of the technical terms and there is also the usual section with calculations. The results are published in the online forum at www.brauweltinternational.com – “Service/Forum”.

Time required for the removal of paper labels in bottle washers

An important criterion for cleaning returnable glass bottles is the time required for the removal of the paper labels. If the adhesive affixing the labels to the surface of the bottles is dissolved too slowly, the labels may be carried into the spray zones of the bottle washing machine, where they can block the spray nozzles and hinder effective cleaning of the bottles. Within the framework of the IGF research project 15343 N, the dissolution of adhesive and removal of different kinds of paper labels from glass bottles was studied by varying a number of factors influencing this process. Subsequently, an expanded model of the removal process for paper labels was developed. This research and the resulting model serves as the basis for a critical review of the relevance of the existing DIN 16524-6 standard for determining the time required for the removal of paper labels [5].

A step-change technology solution

In order to enable real energy saving principles to be applicable to brewing plants of all shapes and sizes, measures to reduce energy consumption include fundamental process alternatives and implementation of new technical solutions. This paper describes an innovative technology that offers an important step-change in brewing; one which saves energy, reduces capital expenditure, and allows brewers to rethink their brewhouse processing technologies.