The work accomplished by ProLeiT on behalf of Colombia’s Bavaria brewery can be best compared with open heart surgery on a top athlete performing under stress on an ergometer during the intervention. ProLeiT has successfully managed to gradually upgrade this large brewery with an annual production of around 11 million hectoliters, which is currently undergoing a capacity expansion, to the brewmaxx V8 process control system. This modern control system not only reduces the number of isolated solutions and optimizes process sequences, but also enables consistent tracking and tracing on the basis of its integrated MES functionality.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is nothing if not a mouthful. Multinational companies over-engage in a vast range of activities that come under the doing-good umbrella. It spans everything: from volunteering in the local community to looking after employees’ health, from giving out micro-credit to women in Bangladesh to saving the rainforests. With such a fuzzy, wide-ranging subject, many companies find it hard to know what to focus on. Still, CSR is booming. Whether through their websites or glossy reports, big multinationals want to tell the world they are good and ethical and their bosses right and reasonable. None of this means that CSR has suddenly become a great idea. But in practice few big companies can now afford to ignore it.

The comprehensive modernization of process control systems or the migration of automation software to state-of-the-art technology are major prerequisites for more efficient and competitive brewing processes. The Warsteiner Brewery has therefore recently converted the automation technology of its entire brewing plant to ProLeiT’s modern brewmaxx V8 process control system in several project steps. In this way, the company is creating ideal conditions for extra-high productivity; on the basis of integrated materials management, the company has for the first time also achieved consistent traceability for breweries. This multi-stage project clearly demonstrates that a fundamental modernization approach of this kind can only be successful if all of the operator’s and suppliers’ specialists cooperate as closely as possible. The automation specialists require a comprehensive understanding of brewing processes because this is the only way to successfully modernize brewing plants during production.

Isomaltulose (Palatinose™) is a sugar naturally occurring in honey and sugar cane molasses that has become growingly popular as functional carbohydrate for beverage products after its introduction in 2005. It exhibits a number of specific characteristics that make it very suitable for use in human nutrition thus offering great potential for innovative sport- and energy drink concepts as well as functional alcohol-free malt-based beverages with balanced and sustained energy-release profile. Extensive screening tests demonstrated that many common brewing yeasts are unable to ferment isomaltulose which resulted in a positive influence on the mouth-feel of alcohol-reduced and alcohol-free beers that typically lack body.

In all production areas as well as in the laboratory, the Karlsberg Brauerei GmbH in Homburg uses Qualifax® from GQM mbH, Landshut as their information management system, which documents and evaluates production data for every step of the production process. Data are automatically exchanged with the ERP system.

Will I live to the ripe old age of 93 because I have never touched alcohol, but have eaten lots of wholemeal bread, done my exercises and gone to bed early? Or will I escape the Grim Reaper because I enjoy my food and drink, don’t say no to pork crackling followed by two vodkas, organise a large family, listen to Mozart operas and obey the whims of our cat? The self-styled experts in the field of alcohol research will probably underline the former, whereas any self-respecting scientist will argue: that depends. There are thousands of factors influencing our daily life. Yet, again and again, anti-alcohol lobbyists grab the headlines with findings which turn almost everybody, except perhaps for the fundamentalist teetotaller, into a self-abusing binge drinker and hence a burden on society.

”Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. For more than twenty years, since the publication of the Brundtland Report on sustainable development, we have heard the message well, yet our faith in the public and private sectors doing the right thing was fairly weak.

If you publically defy the Coca-Cola Company and turn down their buyout offer, you must have an ace up your sleeve. Small wonder that those in the know (and those who’d like to be) watch with abated breath how Germany’s zeitgeist lemonade Bionade hopes to add some fizz to America’s flat carbonates market.

Growing wireless portfolio helps improve brewery efficiency, maintain consistent quality and optimise existing assets. Today, many breweries are assessing a range of automation options, including wireless, that have the potential to improve production efficiency, maintain consistent quality and optimise the use of their existing assets.

Current issue

Brauwelt International Newsletter

Newsletter archive and information

Mandatory field