Yeast handling in brewing

Yeast is a vital ingredient in brewing as it is responsible for the fermentation process. It takes simple sugars such as glucose and maltose to produce essential ingredients such as alcohol and carbon dioxide. When yeast is pumped around a brewery, it is important that it transferred with care to avoid damage that could degrade its effect and ultimately the taste of the beer.

Whether it’s simply transferring yeast from one brewing stage to another, dosing (or pitching) yeast into the fermentation vessel or recovering (or harvesting) yeast for re-use after fermentation, using the right yeast pump provides huge benefits.

Adopting the right technologies

The shear-sensitive nature of yeast makes it prone to damage with many pump types. Watson-Marlow Fluid Technology Group’s range of peristaltic and sinusoidal pumps have an extremely gentle pumping action, which protects the pumped yeast from degradation.

Important processing and handling needs are met by using a pump with a gentle pumping principle, accurate and repeatable flow, high suction capability, hygienic design and infrequent, safe, easy and low cost maintenance such as our Certa or Bredel range.

• Low shear pumping
• Highly accurate
• High suction capabilities
• Hygienic design with simple, quick maintenance

Pumping technologies with a high suction capability are crucial, particularly for bottom-fermenting yeasts, which can be difficult to move from the potentially numerous fermentation tanks located around the brewery. Additionally, recovering yeast following fermentation (yeast harvesting or cropping) can be a particular challenge depending upon product viscosity, pipe lengths/diameters and varying vessel distances. Gentle product handling is therefore important to maximize yield thereby reducing costs.

Additionally, hygiene is an important consideration for brewers. Bacteria entering the fermentation process can seriously affect the quality of the beer, causing ‘off flavors’. Our range of peristaltic and sinusoidal pumps are of a hygienic design and can offer clean-in-place (CIP) compatibility.

Each of these features ensure that, in addition to producing a high quality and consistent beer, wastage is reduced. Combined with infrequent and simple maintenance, our pumping technologies help to keep overall production costs to a minimum.

Proven pumps

The typical advantages and high performance levels delivered by proven MasoSine Certa’s sinusoidal technology include virtually no pulsation, superior viscous handling, simplicity, reliability, energy efficiency, interchangeable parts and low cost of ownership. Offering EHEDG (Type EL Class I and now EL Aseptic Class I) and 3A certification as standard, Certa is extremely easy to clean for minimal maintenance and downtime.

Bredel hose pumps deliver a fixed volume of liquid every revolution, dosing the required amount irrespective of fluid viscosity or process conditions, without shear and without oxygen being introduced. Quality and repeatability are assured.

At the heart of our Bredel hose pumps are the hoses. To better meet hygiene, performance and process uptime requirements, our F-NBR food grade hose paired with our Bredel Pumps deliver a consistent and reliable performance. The hoses meet FDA 21CFR177.2600, EC 1935/2004 and BfR XXI cat.4 regulations, while providing up to 80% longer life.