Advice - Looking to purchase 50 hl brewhouse

[Amit]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to decide on equipment for a 50hl brewhouse and a fermenting capacity of 3300hl with a bottling line.

Any recommendation on which brewhouse will be better. I was thinking to go German (G.E.A looks awesome on the website)or Austrian.

Any companies that are better and more cost effective. I am looking at European manufactures.

Thanks

Amit.

[dick murton]

I think one of the key questions to ask yourself is what materials you are intending to use. If all malt, then you should be OK with a lauter tun system. If you want to use large quantities of adjunct, rice grits or maize grits, then I suggest you seriously look at using the mini mash filter system from Meura.

If you want to do different brewlengths on a fairly regular basis, then a lauter tun is somewhat more flexible than a mash filter, which I think is only capable of + / - 10 % - though happy to be corrected on that.

After that, I think most of the German suppliers should be fine, including GEA, Nerb and Meura (Belgian). Not sure if Krones (Steincker) do a mini system now. I don't remember seeing anything from them. They will all be expensive, but to a large extent, you get what you pay for. Certainly the couple of large breweries I worked with thought that the additional cost of for example, the German bottle washers was far outweighed by the reliability and materials usage (water, chemicals, thermal energy) compared to the local industries bottle washers.

I know that Heineken at least prefer mash filters for extract efficiency and low water usage and effluent production - the latter being especially important where water supply is critical.

If you are likely to suffer from unplanned power cuts, then I suggest you check with them all re provision for restarting, reduction of losses arising from the plant shutdown. This may influence your decision.

All of them will automate as much as you want. Even with cheap labour, the maintenance of quality will be vastly improved with an automated system compared to large amounts of manual labour - so I suggest you automate as much as possible. Suggest that you make sure that local programming companies are available for support with the particular software used, though with internet connections, you can get support from Europe remotely. And you don't have to use German / Belgian programmers for most of the general transfer / CIP stuff. In fact, you many find you don't get German software engineers but more Eastern European engineers, due to the cost advantage even if you get the whole package from say GEA.