Brewery of the future

While the UK brewing industry is calling for a freeze on duties, new technology in the form of a “Brewery of the Future” concept from Martens Brewery Group of Bocholt, Belgium, could offer a better long-term solution.

Martens has built a 3-million hectolitre brewery, which is claimed to dramatically reduce the capital costs of establishing a new brewery as well as the cost of beer production. Measuring just 200 metres by 350 metres, the plant houses utilities, brewhouse, filtration, yeast management - for four different yeast strains - and fermentation areas, plus a wastewater treatment plant.

The Belgian facility began production on 1 May, 2007 and currently operates two large bottling lines. Martens is also involved in the construction of an identical plant in Suzhou, China for Far Eastern Textile - the largest PET granulate producer of Taiwan - which is targeting commissioning in time for the Beijing Olympics.

Brewing equipment supplier Meura was given charge of developing the brewery, which is based on its Meurabrew continuous brewhouse. Dutch group Norit Process Technology was responsible for the overall plant design and supplied the core block and utilities, while French company Sidel supplied the PET bottling line. The Belgian plant is fully

automated via a Siemens control system — in China the control system is integrated into the brewery owners’ existing SAP system.

“This is how a brewery should look nowadays,” Menno Holterman, Norit chief growth officer, said in a recent presentation on the Brewery of the Future to journalists and customers in Wakefield, UK. “Everything is automated. There is no manual operation except for some cleaning once a week from the outside. It is also a very clean environment.”

The entire operation is manned by 45 people, with just two men per shift to run the brewing operation during the daytime. On night shift the operation is unmanned except for a security person at the gate in accordance with Belgian law.

“With these low labour requirements, you can understand that you can make savings. This technology is really an opportunity for brewers to start to make money again. For those that already do, this is a way to make more money,” commented Holterman.

The lead time for the project in Belgium, from contract signature to first beer production, was almost 12 months, continued Holterman. “In China we are going to achieve this project in 10 months because the owners want to have beer up and running before the Olympics.”

According to the Norit executive, the system reduces the traditional cost of building a new brewery by 50%. This is, in part, due to the reduced infrastructure and building requirement, which can represent 30-35% of total project Capex.

The lower cost also reflects the straightforward brewhouse design, which features a single production line, a CIP area and two filtration lines. The process also allows smaller equipment, including piping, to deliver a continuous flow through the system.

The cost of the entire brewery project, works out at just Euro20-25 per hectolitre sold - half of what is normally achieved in the brewing industry, according to Holterman.

Martens’ efforts to reduce the operational costs of the brewery have focused on beer losses, energy and water consumption.

Beer losses have been reduced by a number of measures, Holterman explained: “At the mash filter stage, we get a very high yield and are able to brew a beer with a high gravity, 20-degree Plato. Using microfiltration, you don’t need a pre- or after-run, so you don’t lose a lot of beer [as happens when] traditionally filtering beer with kieselguhr.”

The beer is blended to sales gravity just before the filler and the plant does not require the usual large bright beer area to keep the beer for several days, continued Holterman. The transfer time between the beer membrane filter and the filler is six to eight hours, with the bright beer tank used mainly as a buffer tank on the way to the filling line.

Another cost-saving feature is that the brewery is designed to recover the beer from surplus yeast and can reduce the extract losses in the brewhouse and the packaging area to 0.8%.

Energy consumption is reduced to 15-20kWh per hectolitre of beer produced — excluding the production of the PET bottles, claimed Holterman. This, he said, is due to the use of a special boiler system and a continuous flow through the brewhouse and beer processing areas of 200 hectolitres of beer per hour.

According to Holterman, the set up allows a constant production of steam, air and cooling media and provides the opportunity to recover yeast. He noted: “If you have big peaks and lows it is, of course, more difficult to recover the energy. Either you have to install extra capacity or over-design the steam and cooling systems.”

Norit also installed a new heat recovery system, called HRS LiquiVap, which, it claims, can provide a 60% reduction in energy consumption during the CO2 recovery process, which requires energy to condense the recovered?CO2 from fermentation. The unit is designed to reduce the energy ?costs for evaporation and cooling down of the cooling medium by combining both processes into one efficient process.

The simplified brewing process cuts water consumption by reducing the number of brews, fermenters and filter runs, as well as the amount of cleaning liquids used. The brewery requires 1 hectolitre of product water from local wells and 1.6 hectolitres of process water, also from the wells.

A Norit membrane bioreactor reuses the water in the process and overall the system uses two hectolitres of water per hectolitre of beer. “We believe we can reduce this further and that there are still ways to optimise the system. But this is a good benchmark for the industry,” said Holterman.

The microfiltration system is claimed to ensure that the beer quality is better or comparable to conventional kieselguhr filtration and means a significant reduction in beer spoilage.

“The physical and chemical stability of the beer is much better and, more importantly, the taste stability of the beer is better,” he commented. “There is no formal measure for taste stability today, but, if you compare the quality of the beer after four, five or six months, the taste stability of membrane-filtered beer is 30-35% better than kieselguhr-filtered beer.”

Overall, Holterman said the total cost of ownership of the project concept is half that of the benchmark in modern breweries in Western Europe. “We still see other opportunities to reduce this further, in energy, in water but that takes time. Labour costs, however, are down to a minimum.”

The Martens concept also offers significant supply chain advantages, particularly in global regions that lack the infrastructure to transport the beer competitively over very long distances.

“Brewers in east Europe and China have decentralised to bring the beer production as close as possible to the customer instead of having big warehouses in one or two central locations and shipping the beer for thousands of kilometers,” said Holterman. “This means reduced transportation costs and reduced time that the beer is exposed [to degradation] or is not available in the shops.”