# FACETS OF ENHANCED SUSTAINABILITY WITH NET ZERO BREWHOUSE CONCEPTS
ENHANCED SUSTAINABILITY WITH NET ZERO BREWHOUSE CONCEPTS BY BEERBEV!
October 18, 2024
In today’s rapidly changing world, sustainability and the pursuit of net zero emissions have become more than just goals—they are essential commitments for businesses across all industries. With climate change and environmental degradation affecting communities worldwide, the responsibility to minimize our ecological footprint has never been more pressing. For the brewing industry, which relies heavily on water, energy and raw materials, embracing sustainable practices is not only a moral imperative but also a smart business strategy.
Achieving net zero emissions in a state-of-the-art brewhouse represents a groundbreaking step toward a greener future. By reducing energy consumption, minimizing waste and adopting renewable resources, breweries can lower their carbon impact while improving operational efficiency.
At BeerBev, we are experts in developing concepts for net zero emissions brewhouses and are dedicated to providing tailor-made solutions for our customers worldwide. Independent of any supplier technology, we constantly seek the smartest and most sustainable process solutions to meet your unique needs.
COMBINED INNOVATIVE PROCESS TECHNOLOGIES: HEAT-PUMP TECHNOLOGY WITH TWO-STAGE WORT COOLER
Our concept envisions a brewhouse designed with a strong emphasis on achieving net zero emissions while maximizing energy efficiency through the application of advanced technologies. A key feature of this design is the integration of a two-stage wort cooler in conjunction with a two-stage heat pump system.
In this configuration, the first stage of the wort cooler employs cold water at 22°C, followed by a second stage utilizing glycol, offering greater efficiency compared to the conventional single-stage wort cooler that relies on ice water. As the 98°C wort is cooled to 10°C for pitching, 95°C hot water is recovered through a plate heat exchanger. A two-stage heat pump subsequently heats this water to 99°C, which is then stored in a hot-water tank for use across the brewhouse.
Simultaneously, the heat pump lowers the temperature of 29°C cold water to 7°C. This 7°C water is then mixed inline with the 29°C cold-water flow to achieve a mixing temperature of 22°C for the initial wort cooling stage. Since the cooling water is now colder than the initial cold-water temperature (22°C vs. 29°C), the second stage of glycol cooling demands significantly less energy, yielding substantial energy savings.
This innovative concept not only reduces emissions but also optimizes energy usage, setting a benchmark for sustainability in the brewing industry.
RECOVERED HOT WATER REUSAGE:
HOW TO MAXIMISE THE REUSAGE OF THE RECOVERED WATER IN THE BREWHOUSE
A key innovation in the brewhouse design is the optimized reuse of hot water, significantly reducing energy demand and eliminating steam usage in critical processes.
The mash tun can be heated at the bottom and along the shell using 99°C hot water generated by the two-stage heat pump and wort cooler. While this method achieves slightly lower heating rates compared to steam, it entirely eliminates the need for steam during mashing. For situations requiring faster heating rates, or at the start of production cycles, a steam booster can be activated to safely increase the hot water temperature from 99°C to 110°C.
The system operates as a closed loop, with the return water being stored in an 80°C warm-water tank after the mashing process is complete, ready for reuse in other areas of the brewhouse.
This approach completely eliminates steam consumption for the mashing process, offering significant energy savings and environmental benefits.
The 99°C hot water is also used to pre-heat the lauter wort, raising its temperature from 75°C to 96°C. Afterward, the 80°C water from this process is recovered and stored in a dedicated tank. The wort is then further heated to 99°C with a steam booster before entering the wort kettle.
No additional energy is required for heating in the wort kettle, as the evaporation is achieved through simmering, aided by injecting stripping gas via specialized nozzles.
This integrated hot water system minimizes steam consumption and maximizes the recovery and reuse of energy throughout the brewhouse, contributing to the overall sustainability of the brewing process.
NET ZERO STEAM BOILERS:
HOW TO GENERATE REQUIRED THERMAL ENERGY SUSTAINABLE?
In order to achieve the necessary left steam capacity (steam boosters) while minimizing environmental impact, BeerBev proposes the installation of small biogas or electric steam boilers for the left thermal energy demand. These boilers can be powered by biogas generated from the brewery’s wastewater treatment plant, allowing for net zero emissions. Alternatively, electric boilers can run on electricity produced from photovoltaics, offering a renewable energy solution.
In a conventional brewhouse with an example capacity of 700 hl, approximately 15 t/h of steam would be required. However, with the energy-saving initiatives implemented throughout the brewhouse, steam demand is reduced in this case to just 2.5 t/h. This not only minimizes the size of the boiler but also significantly reduces the required footprint.
Additionally, the recovered 80°C warm water can be reused for cleaning-in-place (CIP) processes across the entire brewery, eliminating the need to heat CIP solutions separately. The 99°C hot water can also be repurposed for sterilizing the filler, operating flash pasteurizers and other key processes, further enhancing the brewhouse's overall efficiency.
NET ZERO STEAM BOILERS:
HOW TO GENERATE REQUIRED THERMAL ENERGY SUSTAINABLE?
In order to achieve the necessary left steam capacity (steam boosters) while minimizing environmental impact, BeerBev proposes the installation of small biogas or electric steam boilers for the left thermal energy demand. These boilers can be powered by biogas generated from the brewery’s wastewater treatment plant, allowing for net zero emissions. Alternatively, electric boilers can run on electricity produced from photovoltaics, offering a renewable energy solution.
In a conventional brewhouse with an example capacity of 700 hl, approximately 15 t/h of steam would be required. However, with the energy-saving initiatives implemented throughout the brewhouse, steam demand is reduced in this case to just 2.5 t/h. This not only minimizes the size of the boiler but also significantly reduces the required footprint.
Additionally, the recovered 80°C warm water can be reused for cleaning-in-place (CIP) processes across the entire brewery, eliminating the need to heat CIP solutions separately. The 99°C hot water can also be repurposed for sterilizing the filler, operating flash pasteurizers and other key processes, further enhancing the brewhouse's overall efficiency.
SUMMARIZED
The innovative design of this brewhouse, with its focus on reducing steam demand and maximizing energy recovery, enables a shift from traditional large-scale steam boilers to a smaller, more efficient system. By utilizing biogas or renewable energy sources, BeerBev helps customers achieve net zero emissions while reducing operational costs and minimizing the brewhouse footprint. The result is a state-of-the-art, sustainable brewing process that meets the needs of breweries worldwide.
# FACETS OF BEVERAGE INTEGRATION WITH DIVERSIFIED PROCESSES
BEVERAGE PROCESS INTEGRATION FOR A DIVERSE PORTFOLIO WITH BEERBEV
Juli 05, 2024
With BeerBev, you partner with experts in engineering excellence, offering specialized automation and control solutions for the beverage industry. We excel in Greenfield Turn-key factory planning, ensuring smooth operations from material handling, mixing, filling, packaging, to logistics. Focusing on efficiency, we optimize processes to maximize output and minimize waste, saving time and resources.
We harmonize advanced process technology with state-of-the-art building design, considering hygienic principles and local conditions. This modern approach prepares factories for future capacity, flexibility, and efficiency needs. Technical planning aligns closely with structural planning, ensuring seamless integration into the overall factory. Our solutions prioritize process engineering quality and microbiological safety, meeting hygienic standards and ensuring maximum functionality.
Sustainable design principles guide our planning, incorporating modern technology to reduce energy consumption and save resources. Our approach balances process technology, hygiene, and functional design, interlinking building, process, and filling technology. Flexible batch sizes and varied packaging units are part of our customized concepts. We account for production planning, capacity increases, and future expansions, ensuring growth potential for years to come.
ADAPTING TO MARKET DEMANDS: BEERBEV'S INNOVATIVE PROCESS SOLUTIONS FOR DIVERSIFIED BEVERAGE PRODUCTION
The global beverage market is seeing increasingly varied demands from consumers, leading to high product diversification. Breweries, wineries, and water bottling plants are expanding their product lines to include soft drinks, non-alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits, vitamin water, cold brew coffee, radler, hard seltzer, iced tea, and cider.
This diversification requires factories to be highly flexible in their production workflows to adapt to changing markets and customer needs. BeerBev offers tailor-made system solutions that enable a wide range of production options beyond traditional fermented beverages. Our technologies, such as dosing stations and multi-mixing systems, ensure high-precision inline mixing with minimal product loss and can be integrated with downstream processes like flash pasteurization, carbonation, and filling.
A growing global trend is the rise in consumption of non-alcoholic alternatives to traditional alcoholic beverages. The technology needed depends on whether you want to inhibit alcohol production from the start or reduce it later. The selection of the best suited technology is supported by our BeerBev experts tailored to your prerequisites and demands. Handling highly concentrated alcohol solutions during production, such as in hard seltzer or when removing alcohol, requires strict explosion prevention and environmental protection. This affects loading stations as well as storage tanks and piping during raw material delivery or for alcohol sales purposes. At BeerBev, we understand the risks and provide expert advice to protect your staff, facilities, and the environment while ensuring you meet legal requirements.
MEETING MARKET DEMANDS: BEERBEV'S FLEXIBLE SOLUTIONS FOR DIVERSIFIED FILLING & (SECONDARY) PACKAGING
If market demand is moving towards even more diversification and new product categories, this observation can also be transferred to secondary packaging. Consumers are increasingly targeting small pack sizes with the greatest possible variance, such as 4-packs, 6-packs, baskets or even multipacks with different products in one packaging unit. This creates further challenges for producers, who BeerBev supports as well by taking the most flexible approach possible to factory planning.
Packaging systems in the secondary packaging sector are tailored to customer needs and their entire product range by developing multifunctional filling concepts with minimized required operators thanks to camera surveillance technology. In the detailed planning of entire filling lines, one-way, returnable and combined systems are specially developed and designed in-house by the BeerBev team. The containers to be filled (bottle, can, keg, PET, etc.), product-specific data (viscosity, CO2 content, filling temperature, shelf life, etc.), various closure systems (crown cork, screw cap, swing top, etc.), coordinated labelling systems (self-adhesive, paper, seal, etc.), and innovative packaging systems (multipacker, wrap-around, shrink tunnel, etc.) are being taken into account carefully.
STREAMLINE YOUR LOGISTICS: BEERBEV'S HOLISTIC APPROACH TO EFFICIENT AND SAFE MATERIAL FLOW
Using a holistic project approach, BeerBev determines the flow of materials, consumption, waste and goods. All logistical activities are considered with the aim of avoiding interference in terms of truck routes, forklift traffic and traffic connections and ensuring health and safety for all employees. When planning the overall logistics concept, the walking routes of employees to the respective workplaces, the delivery and storage of raw materials as well as consumables, full and empty goods logistics and storage (one-way, returnable, etc.) as well as holistic loading logistics are included and being considered.
The logistical planning includes a logical transport infrastructure that supports the customer and its employees in complying with all safety-relevant aspects. As part of an automated warehousing system, BeerBev develops future concepts for automated handling of full loads, including the integration of a high-bay warehouse with several thousand pallet spaces and automatic truck loading to speed up goods handling.
Experience the future in beverage process integration for a diversified product portfolio with us, where process efficiency, and flexibility become miscible to redefine industry standards. OUR EXPERTISE – YOUR VALUE.
# FACTORY PLANNING FOR AGAVE BASED SPIRITS
UNCOVER THE SECRET TO ELEVATING YOUR AGAVE-BASED SPIRITS PRODUCTION WITH BEERBEV!
May 21, 2024
With BeerBev you have a partner striving for engineering excellence, providing expert consultation and cutting-edge automation and control solutions tailored specifically for the agave spirits industry.
We specialize in Greenfield Turn-key factory planning, ensuring seamless operations from Piña handling, over Agave juice extraction, fermentation, filling & packaging, to logistics. With a keen focus on efficiency, we optimize every aspect of the process to maximize output while minimizing waste, saving both time and resources. Our dedication to process efficiency means we harness the natural potential of each agave plant reaching yields of >90%, allowing our customers extracting its essence with precision and care.
Due to the common raw material – agave - the botanical similarity between the Weber agave (agave azul) used for tequila production and the range of different agave varieties used for mezcal production results in similarities in the process design and the underlying process technology for both production processes. However, traditionally, and legally defined, there are also significant differences between the production requirements for the two types of agave-based spirits, which our process engineers are very familiar with and naturally consider for your planning.
MEZCAL
Mezcal is characterized by its often-artisanal production based on traditional methods, which is noticeable in the final product through a clearly perceptible smoky note, which is due to the typical roasting process of the Piñas. Traditionally, the character of mezcal, in contrast to that of tequila, is more strongly influenced by the process before distillation and its variation rather than spirit ageing in wood.
According to customer requirements, our concepts make it possible to combine the artisanal and the more industrial production approach in one production facility. The main process steps are carried out using separate equipment, so that compliance with the various requirements of NOM 070-SCFI-2016 is always ensured. Nevertheless, certain equipment, technology and, finally, the production environment may be used equally in both processes, resulting in positive synergies. By this the efficiency of artisanal production can be maximized by introducing industrial standards that enable superior product quality based on hygienic and controlled process techniques, without having to give up valuable traditions.
TEQUILA
With Beerbev, you can cover all production methods and ageing methods for your desired tequila making process. Innovative processing systems from Beerbev combine new local developments, machines developed in-house and tried-and-tested technology to enable the gentle and efficient extraction of agave azul. This best-in-class approach allows us to achieve maximum agave yield even without the use of diffuser technology.
In addition to the agave yield, energy efficiency is the focus of our tequila process planning. We develop individual energy efficiency concepts that take process-, project- and location-dependent factors into account. We are happy to support you with our expertise in reducing energy costs and CO2 emissions. By optimizing processes and embracing eco-friendly practices, we ensure that every drop of Tequila embodies not just exceptional taste, but also a commitment to environmental stewardship.
Experience the future in factory planning & process integration for agave spirits with us, where innovation, tradition, and sustainability converge to redefine industry standards - OUR EXPERTISE – YOUR VALUE.