Ringwood Brewery adds new steam equipment

Ringwood, UK – Ringwood Brewery has installed steam equipment from TLV Euro Engineering in a new boiler house at its brewery. The facility, in Ringwood, Hampshire, produces around 40,000 barrels of beers, including its CAMRA award-winning Old Thumper.

As several of the brewery’s old-style steam traps were failing – even though test equipment suggested otherwise – Bob Mavin, the brewery’s chief engineer, invited TLV to undertake a steam-trap survey.

Of the 30 traps on site, eight were found to be faulty, which was costing the brewery over £3,000 in wasted energy per year.

Ringwood, therefore, commissioned TLV to undertake annual steam-trap surveys and a rolling steam-trap replacement programme has been initiated to enable Ringwood to continue increasing its efficiency.

TLV has supplied additional equipment for the boiler house, including pressure-reducing valves, flow meters and steam traps, as well as some isolation valves.

At Ringwood, steam is used throughout the process from mashing in, where malt is mixed with water and heated to produce sweet wort, to the wort kettle, where it is boiled for varying times and evaporation rates, depending on the beer type.

Steam is produced by the Ringwood boiler at 8 bar and reduced by one of TLV’s COS-R pressure-reducing valves to 4 bar for the majority of the brewing processes.

However, two other COS-R’s have been installed at locations around the brewery to further reduce the steam pressure to 2 bar for cleaning and sterilisation applications.

Ringwood has also installed a TLV flowmeter to meter the main steam flow from the boiler house and help to correlate the gas-to-steam usage.