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In beer production, breweries obtain reliable quality with a low oxygen content with the help of cutting-edge technology. First and foremost, this makes the use of additives such as bisulphite or ascorbic acid as oxygen scavengers superfluous. This is exactly the issue KHS has addressed with the development of its modular Innofill Glass DRS ECO filling system, and this has long since established itself in practice. One company that trusts the new system is Oettinger Brewery in Mönchengladbach, Germany. According to the customer, the filler gives it low oxygen filling on a scale unprecedented in this form. Less oxygen, lower CO2 consumption The new plant engineering lets less oxygen into the beer – and, in doing so, consumes less CO2 than its predecessor. During bottle filling a new hollow probe filler enables greatly reduced CO2 consumption on the one hand and even lower oxygen pickup on the other. The container is first evacuated through the vacuum channel and then purged with CO2 gas.

A KHS-patented purging process is used to this end. The container is then pressurised to filling pressure with the inert gas as usual. This makes an extremely low total oxygen pickup of 20 ppb possible at a CO2 consumption of 160 g/hl. Further reducing the CO2 consumption to 110 g/hl, for example – half of what was usual to date – also facilitates a very low oxygen pickup of 40 ppb. The required total oxygen pickup can therefore be selected as needed, meaning that a range of automatic product type conversions can be set with maximum CO2 savings for an especially oxygen-sensitive, cold-hopped beer, a dark beer insensitive to oxygen or even for totally different filling products such as soda pop, for instance. Lots of breweries have to buy in their carbon dioxide. Due to rising prices, this is a growing cost factor. The lower the consumption for the filled bottle, the more efficient the production process – and the lower the oxygen pickup, the better the product quality. KHS has effected a perfect combination of both of these issues on its Innofill Glass DRS ECO. Furthermore, digital and automated systems synchronise the filling processes and thus considerably boost efficiency. Find out more here.