Monday, March 9, 2009

Kegs and bottles!

Just in response to a question about kegging and bottle washing:

Way back in the beginning of packaging, if you wanted to buy some beer, you would take a bucket or some type of transfer device to the brewery and pay or barter to fill it. They would have an open tank of beer brewed that day. Normally it takes six days for microorganisms to really grow and spoil the beer. The beer would be consumed in the first few days of purchase. This was a very fresh product, but you had to live next to a brewery to get it.

The problem was that in the hot summer months the beer would spoil much faster. Before refrigeration, beer wasn't brewed in the hot summer months, but mainly at the ending of winter. That beer needed to be stored to maintain a low microbial count. Holes and caves were employed. If you go to the Pilsen Urquell Brewery, you can still tour the deep caves they excavated to keep their beer.

Beer transport was done in wooden casks at this point. They were easier to move and easy to tap. After a little pitch on the inside of the cask, oxygen uptake and wood flavors were kept to a minimum. Wooden casks were choice for quite a while until more modern breweries started to look for a more durable product. Obviously, the wooden casks could not take the harsh detergents we use now making them very time and labor intensive.

The market shifted to many different materials to replace the wooden cask. Aluminum and steel were the winners for their durability. Stainless steel became the most used material in kegs, and brew-houses, because it would not break down in the presence of NaOH(caustic soda) unlike copper and aluminum. Caustic soda continues to be the choice of breweries for its ability to break down fats and its price.

Stainless steel kegs originally had a bunghole where the product was introduced and the keg was cleaned. Developments in the industry allowed kegs to be "tapped" with a fitting that in combination would apply CO2 and distribute beer to a faucet. However, the filling of these kegs was time consuming and chance of oxygen uptake was quite high. These systems are still in use around the would. These filling machines I believe can go as fast as 2,000 kegs per 8 hour day.

The keg as we know it today was made for one reason: automation. It has many benefits like low oxygen uptake, zero UV uptake, steam sanitization, etc. But the one reason it was developed was to make the brewhouse more efficient. Kegs these days are loaded, depressurized, cleaned, sanitized, filled, pasteurized, palletized and shipped automatically.

Here's a link to some great products offered by KHS in Germany:

http://www.khs.com/us/website.php?id=/en/solutions/keg/peripherie.htm

Please browse their many pretty pictures of kegging machines.

Newer kegs now are only a half barrel(15.5 gallons) or less, as opposed to the full, back-breaking barrel, and have top handles for easy movement. They consist of a tube that goes down to the bottom of the keg to dispense beer and a CO2 inlet at the top to pressurize. But enough about kegs, let's move on to bottles!

Now, why doesn't the States use those heavy-duty returnable bottles like some places in Europe? We used to return bottles; why not anymore? Wouldn't it be more "green" to re-use bottles?

The number one reason we as a country went away from returnable bottles was fuel costs. As a country we drank more and more macro-beer. Macro-beer is made in extremely large facilities in only a few places across the country. The cost of shipping heavy bottles only to be sorted out as mostly trash was not worth the effort or the fuel. It is less "green" to ship heavy bottles for consumption and return than to ship lighter bottles for consumption and recycling. In some countries, shipping is not that bad so governments has enforced a bottle return policy.

To tell you the truth it wouldn't be that bad if we enforced the same rules (and we might!). We would just have to drink more local. It is my belief that certain taxation laws inhibit small brewers and help large brewers. Maybe that will change, maybe not.

Anywho, that's the reason that some bottles have labels that come off easy. They are meant to be sent through a bottle washer. Bottle washers are an extremely expensive piece of equipment and no brewer would want one unless forced by their government. If we forced our breweries to buy and use bottle washers without some kind of subsidy, it would surely put the small guys out of business. Check out this standard bottle washer from Krones:

http://www.krones.com/downloads/reinigungstechnik_e.pdf

2 comments:

Colin said...

You said "bunghole"

Kevin said...

The bottle washer link I showed has an upper range of 120,000 bottles per minute. Even a compact version would be expensive, but I didn't mean to lead on that even small breweries would need this washer.