Brewing grows with the flow

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Brewing grows with the flow

The Oettinger brewery produces beer with a highly efficient energy management concept from MTU Onsite Energy

The Oettinger brewing group produces around 1.8 billion bottles of beer a year at its four locations in Germany

The process is intensively automated and employs a highly efficient energy management concept. The brewery seems able to effortlessly reconcile apparent contradictions. It is both a family-run business and large-scale company. It combines ultramodern, automated production with tradition. It places great value on environmental awareness as well as ensuring it provides value for money.

A brew is born

Trucks deliver malt to the breweries where it is stored in silos until it is needed for processing.

The malt is ground in the malt-mill before being fed through pipelines to the mash tun and mixed with water to create the actual mash. As it is heated, the mash gradually releases its vital ingredients to determine the character of the beer to be produced – dark or light, mild or stronger flavor. “It’s not just the quality of the malt that is critical here. Water quality is also crucial,” explained Metz. The brew then flows to the lauter tun where the solids from the malt are separated from the liquor.

The remaining spent grain or ‘draff’ is drawn off through pipelines, contained and loaded onto trucks to be used in agricultural animal fodder or to produce bread or distillery products.The remaining wort flows through other pipes to the wort copper where it is mixed with hops and boiled. The brew is then cooled in the wort cooler before yeast is added and alcohol forms in the fermentation tank. When its work is done, the yeast is extracted and the beer is left to rest in a storage vat before the final stage in the process decides whether the beer is to be filtered to produce pilsener-type products or clear, light beer types. For naturally cloudy beers, the filtration process is bypassed and the product is directly bottled or filled into kegs in the filling plant.

“We start ten 1,000-hectoliter batches here every day,” explains Technical Director Ludwig Metz. Shiny stainless steel vats and pipelines are everywhere. Operating staff are few and far between. “We have two brewing assistants and a master brewer on duty in the brewery round the clock. That is all the staff we need here,” adds Metz.

Background processes keep things flowing

Brewing is an energy-intensive business. 300-400 liters of water are needed to produce just 100 liters of beer. Generating the necessary electricity, heat and cooling power also generates costs and can be environmentally unfriendly.

Oettinger investigated a range of possibilities to ensure its operations ran at maximum efficiency and decided that the best solution was a combined heat and power (CHP) plant with an absorption chilling unit. “At our company we set great store by regional identity and brand awareness. That is why we commissioned a firm of consulting engineers and why we opted for a top-brand CHP solution from MTU Onsite Energy in Augsburg, using engines that are built in the region,” says Metz.

The ‘Moroschan’ engineering consultancy designed the facilities for the brewery, stipulating 5,000 hours of CHP plant operation a year. Downtime was to be scheduled outside brewing operations and 100% of the power generated was to be available for use by the relevant production facility. On this basis, the consultancy decided on an MTU 16V 4000 gas engine delivering 2,000 kW of electrical energy. Oettinger uses the thermal energy discharged from the engine to heat the brewing water. In the Oettingen brewery, the engine exhaust is used to generate steam and in the Mönchengladbach brewery it is used to heat water for the mash house. In the Oettingen brewery, the engine’s thermal base load is also sufficient to run an absorption chiller unit for cooling the storage tanks. The absorption chiller unit alone accounts for 20% of the brewery requirement for cooling the storage tanks.

Beer production and the filling equipment needed to wash bottles and kegs use a lot of water and Oettinger cleans that water in its own two-stage treatment plant. In Oettingen, the biogas generated in the treatment plant is used to fuel the boiler house and therefore is also utilised in the heating process.

Beer brewing today is an industrial process: brewing in the copper vats is computer-controlled and each temperature change is precisely programmed. At the new, state-of-the-art brewing plants, the only indication that beer is being brewed is the aroma of the simmering wort. Virtually nothing else remains to be seen of the process. Four huge stainless steel vats have been erected in the southern brewing plant that was constructed in 2002. The operating crew for the brewery oversees everything, including the technology systems such as the combined heat and power (CHP) module from MTU Onsite Energy and the absorption chilling plant.