A brewery rich in tradition, Brauhaus Riegele in Augsburg, Germany, brews a total of 29 different beers. Almost all of the beers have been honored with numerous prestigious awards. In order to ensure that the beer leaves the brewery in perfect condition and remains so until it reaches the customer, the oxygen values must be reduced to a minimum and continuously analyzed, in this case with oxygen measuring devices supplied by Dr. Thiedig GmbH & Co KG, Berlin, Germany.

Petainer has launched a range of new rental agreements for filling and blowing lines to help customers take full advantage of the petainerKeg^TM system.

Dry-hopped beers are all the rage at the moment, but how does hopping on the cold side affect a beer’s colloidal stability and resistance to aging? Preliminary empirical tests on dry-hopped beers at the Chair of Brewing and Beverage Technology, TU München-Weihenstephan, revealed that hop additions on the cold side bring about a decline in the chemical-physical stability of beer and can result in haze formation or flocculation.

Breweries devote continuous attention towards improving and stabilising beer quality. In order to fill the perfect beer, choice of raw materials as well as the brewing process is subject to the most stringent specifications and tests. Unfortunately, thorough quality monitoring often stops at this point.

The term Industry 4.0 is currently on everyone’s lips. The concept behind this idea is to design intelligent production systems and, with the help of networking with the Internet, facilitate flexible and efficient production. The paradigms from Industry 4.0 have found their way into beverage production and filling equipment.

International corporations are frequently not only characterized by their size, but by their complexity. Spread over multiple culturally and economically diverse countries, with production plants which have grown heterogeneously over time, beverage manufacturers often face unequal levels of performance and unequal degrees of automation. To achieve global harmonization, corporate standards are rolled out step by step.

The inspection quality of empty bottle inspectors has become considerably more differentiated in terms of recognition accuracy in recent years, thanks to new computer/camera technology and more powerful software. The reliability of test results is, however, dependent not only on inspection accuracy. More to the point, proper functioning of the various inspection units has to be assured. Without self-monitoring of the test procedure, there is no ultimate safety. Shortcomings associated with self- monitoring are still found in connection with optical inspection components. A newly developed monitoring procedure closes this safety gap.

The can is currently undergoing a clear growth on the European market and proving very popular among consumers, with beer and soft drinks in particular the canned beverages of choice. In the next few years leading beverage can manufacturers forecast a further growth in sales on the international markets. Reason enough, then, for brewery Pilsner Urquell to continue to market its world-famous specialty beer of the same name in cans and to invest in a new can filler.

Packaging diversity in the brewing and beverage industry has been on the increase for years. For example, whereas all German brewers filled more or less the same beer crates with identical Euro bottles in times past, one nowadays finds a colourful mix of bottle shapes and packaging types. In any event, this plus in versatility involves more changeovers, in particular more sorting and repacking costs, in a nutshell: machinery and equipment has to comply with more complex specifications. Nevertheless, packers and palletisers in the brewing and beverage industry must, at the same time, be reliable, effective and economical. This circumscribes an environment in which freely programmable and flexibly adaptable robot solutions score – especially when in gantry-frame design.

If a brewery wishes to fill typical reusable kegs and various disposable kegs, experience has shown that they will need substantial manpower or even different filling and cleaning systems in order to accomplish that. It will quickly become apparent that costs will skyrocket, not just for the machinery but also for the training and conversion effort. As a result, the work load strongly increases as well. Using the example of Kiuchi Brewery, Naka, Ibaraki, Japan, this article introduces a system that is able to simply and flexibly process various container types.