...everything in control
Pasteurization, sterilization and temperingThe thermal treatment of beverages is an essential part of extending their microbiological shelf life. Product safety, while minimizing quality loss due to heat input, is a top priority in pasteurization. Our Short-Time Heating System (KZE) offers both to our customers, along with easy operation, recipe management, and highly precise control algorithms.
The unspoken currency of pasteurization is the so-called pasteurization unit, which measures the pasteurization effect. Our systems regulate with high precision and recipe-based control to the parameters specified by the customer. The incoming beer is preheated via a regenerative heat exchanger and brought to the desired holding temperature using hot water in a secondary circuit. This resulting holding time can also be individually chosen by the customer for the product‘s process.
Yeast propagation requires sterile wort, which is achieved efficiently and continuously with our Wort Sterilizer CWS. Similar to short-time heating, the wort is regeneratively heated and then heated to temperatures of up to 110 °C using steam or hot water. Our product coolers ensure rapid and efficient cooling after pasteurization, either as part of the overall KZE concept or as standalone systems, for example, used as young beer coolers to reduce long cooling times before bottling in the brewing process, or as wort coolers in conjunction with our Wort Aeration CWA.
Cooling media can include various refrigerants, such as glycol or ammonia. In all temperature control processes, whether pasteurizing, sterilizing, cooling, or preheating, leak-tightness of the cooling or heating medium is important, along with precise and stable control. A pressure gradient from the product to the medium ensures absolute safety, which is regulated and monitored as needed.
Did you know?The basis for the pasteurization unit (PE) is the D-value and the z-value. The D-value represents the time needed to reduce the number of microorganisms by a factor of 10 at a specific temperature. The z-value, on the other hand, is the required temperature increase to reduce the D-value by a factor of 10.
The z-value thus characterizes the dying behavior of microorganisms depending on temperature and time and is therefore part of the PE formula. However, the z-value is not only dependent on temperature but also on the medium and varies for each microorganism. Therefore, an average value is used in short-time heaters.
