An update on CO2 recovery systems and quality in the brewing industry.

Harder, S.D.

Abstract
A distillation column intended to be incorporated into systems for recovering carbon dioxide from brewery fermenters is described. It is intended to overcome one of the main problems of conventional recovery systems, namely that they can only produce carbon dioxide of the extremely high degree of purity (at least 99.99%) required for use in beer carbonation, packaging, dispensing, etc., if the crude gas given off by the fermenter already contains at least 99.7% carbon dioxide before treatment; as much of the fermenter gas output contains significant quantities of vapours and gases other than carbon dioxide, there is a considerable degree of wastage. Using the distillation column to remove other constituents, it is stated to be possible to obtain acceptably pure carbon dioxide from a crude fermenter gas with a carbon dioxide content as low as 95%.
Keywords : brewery carbon dioxide distillation equipment fermentation purification recovery