78. Depletion of water as a source for the beer brewery through freeze crystallization

Lars Erlbeck (1), Frank-Jürgen Methner (2), Matthias Rädle (1); (1) University of Applied Science, Mannheim, Germany; (2) Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Analytical
Poster

Providing good water quality, as one of the most eminently important educts in the brewery industry, is essential to produce constant beer quality. Known processes are not able to work without chemicals. A prospective alternative including the ice phase could be freeze crystallization. Until today the process has been used in the food industry only to concentrate juices or solutions, but it can also be used to clean water from ions. In contrast, the crystallized solvent is the product and does not have to be crystallized completely. This is why the development of a technical process with variable parameters depending on the source water is quite important. In this poster will be shown how crystallization can be realized, which technical and non-laboratory crystallization processes are possible, and on which parameters water quality depends and how to determine them. Interesting points are ice growth and ice quality with changing parameters like temperature gradient, fluent characteristics, and crystal size. As another important factor the past treatment will be discussed concerning results made by centrifuging and pressing to force the included liquid to leave the ice so higher rates of purification can be achieved. The whole process is working to deplete magnesia, calcium, iron, and manganese ions. Besides the positive effect on yeast, it leads to less hardness of water and to a stable pH value, and so to a good brewery process.

Lars Erlbeck received a B.S. degree in chemical technology and an M.S. degree in chemical engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Mannheim. He also received an MBA in engineering management at the Wilhelm Büchner University in Darmstadt. Since then he has been writing his Ph.D. thesis on freeze crystallization at the Technical University of Berlin.