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Craft Brewery Uses IPEC Rotary Drum Screen in Wastewater Before Anaerobic Digester

| | Industrial Processing News

JWC’s IPEC Rotary Drum Screen Used for Protection from Filter Clogging in Brewery Wastewater

Matt Brewing Co., which makes the Saranac brand of craft beer, is a picture of sustainability in the craft brewing community, using several energy-saving methods within their brewing process. While a lot of liquids end up in the beer, nearly 900 gallons of brewery wastewater flow through the system every minute, which includes tough, gritty spent hops.  An on-site 200,000 equalization tank normalizes the flow of the wastewater and preconditions it before it is pumped to the company’s five anaerobic digester units.  Organics in the digesters are used to create biogas composed of methane gas which are then used to power brewery operations.  To help protect the heat exchanger before the digester the company was using a two-dimensional filter to capture the hops.

Unfortunately for the Matt Brewing staff the spent hops regularly clogged the filter, and operators had to clean it manually each time. After dealing with this hassle for years, the brewery team conducted research on alternative screening products. This led them to JWC’s IPEC internally fed rotary screen, which catches the spent grain brewery wastewater but allows the yeast to flow through to the anaerobic digester. Since the installation of the drum screen, Matt Brewing eliminated costly downtime due to filter maintenance, and hasn’t experienced any issues with their anaerobic digester as related to spent hops or grains.

In parallel with this project Matt Brewing also installed one of JWC’ IPEC PLB 1272 screw press conveyors for the drum screen discharge.  The PLB takes the screen hops materials and compresses them for dryer, more compact discharge.  The final dryness was in the 18-25% range.

Read about the details of Matt Brewing’s screening project here!

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