Craft brewing
Combining Alfa Laval’s experience, expertise and advanced machinery with the energy and creativity of craft beer makers is a potent brew. Alfa Laval is supporting many companies on their unique craft brewing journeys, helping them overcome a variety of challenges along the way. Alfa Laval offers expert guidance from people who understand the craft brewing sector, from getting new equipment installed right the first time around, to ensuring ongoing partnership and support.
Alfa Laval is ready to help with:
- Solutions for all craft brewers, by those who know their trade
- A proven track record of improved yield and reduced water and energy consumption
- Flexibility to enable customers to diversify and quickly tap into new trends in craft brewing
- A global service network of craft brewing specialists to support you with equipment, systems and expertise.
Delivering stand-out beers
The craft of making great beer blends complex processes with creative artistry. Bridging the gap between theory and practical craft brewing comes from the experience of being able to identify the challenges ahead and to respond before they become issues, while retaining a focus on brewing a stand-out, characterful beer.
Alfa Laval’s proven craft brewing equipment and solutions, from individual components and process modules to turn-key projects, are designed so that everyone from independent local producers to global breweries can improve the quality of their craft beers, optimize production, reduce costs and minimize environmental impacts. By enabling tight control over your brewing and your costs, Alfa Laval helps customers make amazing, stand-out beers.
Tackling the challenges in the beer-making process with our brewing equipment
From the brewhouse to the packaging, looking to drive quality and efficiency improvements in operations is an everyday fact of life for craft brewers. Incremental improvements to wort yields, beer loss or water usage can amount to significant quality boosts and savings over the long term.
Alfa Laval offers brewing process expertise, solutions and individual components for each process block to help customers avoid and overcome common issues, boosting profitability and efficiency as they go.
Brewhouse
The craft brewer’s drive for profitable and efficient operations starts in the brewhouse, and it is here where Alfa Laval offers the very latest solutions as it continually innovates and optimizes its equipment.
From the wort preparation, to the whirlpool, to the wort cooling, the challenges are many, and can include slow wort production, high energy and water usage, ingredient loss, fouling, and waste management.
Alfa Laval has the extraordinary solutions for these ordinary challenges to allow craft brewers to make great beer while saving on water and energy. Alfa Laval’s advanced technology ensures the optimum performance as decanters dewater spent grains; plate heat exchangers power energy recovery systems, rotary jet heads improve efficiency and hygiene, and intelligent whirlpool systems improve wort clarity before cooling.
Technology such as the Aldox process module, which produces high-quality deaerated and carbonated water, has been designed in close cooperation with the industry to ensure maximum performance.
The real deal: improving efficiency in the brewing of craft beers
When an independent brewery in Northern Europe was looking to replace the heat exchanger it used for cooling wort – a central part of brewing operations – they chose an H4 from Alfa Laval’s Hygienic line. They are now producing their signature wild yeast beers with higher hygiene and greater efficiency than ever.
Unrivalled expertise is brewed from a global beer adventure
There are not many careers where visiting craft breweries all over the world and sampling their product is part of the job description – but Jarim Guajardo gets to do just that. He has a great excuse, though. As Global Product Manager, Process and Filtration Systems at Alfa Laval, the visits offer him an unrivalled insight into this part of the brewing industry.
Coldblock
The craft brewer needs reliable and effective equipment in the coldblock to ensure great beer is hygienically produced, with consistent fermentation and efficient, cost-effective water and energy use.
Yeast management systems including yeast propagation plant, and dry hopping equipment such as Alhop and Iso-Mix External Drive are essential parts of the coldblock and need to be handled with great care.
Challenges such as foaming, process inconsistency, subpar hygiene, lengthy sedimentation time, beer loss and excess yeast can be effectively tackled with Alfa Laval’s world-class product portfolio of rotary jet mixers, centrifugal separators, coolers, tanks and more.
Multifunctional mixing system helps extend commercial success at Harpoon Brewery
Harpoon Brewery is an American craft brewery with roots in a driven passion for beer, along with a determination to make more high-quality beer choices available to the enthusiastic
consumer. Harpoon was started in 1986 on the Boston waterfront – the first brewery to commercially brew and bottle beer in Boston in more than a quarter of a century.
Optiwia™ marks significant milestone for water savings in brewery and beverage industries
With the global focus sharpening on the importance of efficient water use in industrial operations, a simple piece of new technology is set to make a big difference when it comes to saving water and costs in the brewing and beverage industries. It is already showing its worth at a craft brewery in France, where optimizing the water-use efficiency of their Brew 250 centrifuge without impacting on quality has increased the overall sustainability of their production processes.
Beer filtration and treatment
Production demands for craft breweries are intensifying as consumer tastes broaden and grow, and with it comes the challenge to increase product offerings while maintaining high quality and hygiene.
With Alfa Laval, craft brewers receive expert solutions in managing filtration, carbonation, alcohol adjustment, additive management, pasteurization and sterile filtration, and for those creating shandies, radlers, low-alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages, there is world-class technology and expertise on hand to ensure demand can be met in these growing markets.
Preventing spoilage and clogging, and effectively managing waste, water and energy in the coldblock are absolutely key to efficient and profitable operations. Alfa Laval understands the imperatives of avoiding oxidization, managing CO2 levels and maintaining microbiological stability, with equipment such as the Aldox Mini, which produces perfectly deaerated water, delivering world-class performance.
From centrifugal separators in Alfa Laval’s Brew Series, unmatched in their flexibility and effectiveness, to sterile filtration modules, pasteurization systems, the Iso-Mix Mini with rotary jets, and equipment to meet the growing drinking trends, such as the Lowal dealcoholizer and Dealcoholization Module, craft brewers can be reassured they have access to the very best brewing technology and expertise.
Crafting excellence: Alfa Laval centrifuge’s impact on flavor and efficiency at Fat Head’s Brewery
In a recent conversation, Matt Cole and Chris Alltmont of Fat Head’s Brewery shared some insights from their craft beer adventure – full of surprises and transformations, with an Alfa Laval centrifuge as an unexpected star player. Curious to know how Fat Head’s Brewery secured their gold medals at the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival? Well, the Alfa Laval Brew 350 played an important role.
How to max the hoppiness using a beer centrifuge
Mic recently installed the Alfa Laval Brew 80-plus centrifuge in his new brewery venture on New Zealand’s beautiful South Island. As a craft brewery veteran who owned a successful brewery in the US before, he knows that there’s more to centrifuge technology than fast filtration, as consumer demand for hoppier premium beers is increasing.
Cleaning and preparation of lines
The preparation and cleaning of lines in craft brewing is an absolutely crucial stage of the process, and Alfa Laval supports brewers in achieving the highest hygienic standards, avoiding issues such as oxidization, while effectively managing the impacts of high water, energy and chemical use.
Getting it wrong can have significant impacts on yield, quality and uptime, so craft brewers can be sure to get it right by using innovative and effective equipment, such as the Aldox Mini and TJ40G rotary jet heads. Alfa Laval’s tank-top system, which streamlines every stage of the process, can be partnered with Alfa Laval’s CIP systems, so that craft brewers can optimize sequences, reducing overall water and chemical usage.
Documents
