The first century of beer separation

In 1909, and thus precisely 100 years ago, the first separator was used for beer clarification in a brewery in Vienna – it was built by the Oelde-based company Ramesohl & Schmidt, which later became GEA Westfalia Separator. Since that time, the trend towards the centrifuge has been unbroken. On the contrary, the trend is being reinforced: This is because a separator or decanter removes precisely what it is required to remove, does not require any filter aids and also operates on a continuous basis; it also provides very gentle product treatment.

However, let us return to the beginnings. The next milestone was set in 1930, when GEA Westfalia Separator submitted a patent for a centrifugal bowl with automatic sludge discharge to the Imperial Patent Office. In the 1950’s, GEA Westfalia Separator then focused on brewery business. Chamber-type bowl separators were used for this purpose, in order to remove trub, yeast and other solids from hot and cold worts as well as the finished beer.

Continuous method of operation, higher clarification performance
At the end of the 1960’s, the chamber-type bowl separators were replaced by more powerful and self-cleaning separators. Continuous method of operation, higher clarification performance of up to 200 hl green beer per hour, higher yield as well as periodic solids discharge at full operating speed were only some of the convincing arguments which favoured these new SAMP-type clarifiers. The separators became more and more established from this point onwards particularly in the large breweries. For instance, the Schlitz brewery in Milwaukee/USA had installed 26 type SA 80 separators in its four production facilities in 1975 for clarifying young beer.

The limit of what is feasible constantly extended to new horizons
And GEA Westfalia Separator was always at the forefront of progress with its innovations in subsequent years, and was constantly extending the limit of what is feasible to new horizons. With the introduction of a new generation of self-cleaning clarifiers, which are equipped with the patented Westfalia Separator hydrostop system for rapid and precise discharges, a further breakthrough was for instance achieved in 1984 in the brewery sector. With the kieselguhr-free PROFI^® filtration, a combination of separators and membrane filtration, GEA Westfalia Separator has been conquering the market since the beginning of the new century, because practise has shown that: PROFI^® is the kieselguhr-free filtration which genuinely functions and which reliably meets the agreed performance and consumption figures.

Since that time, brewery centrifuges, in certain cases together with membrane filtration, have been conquering more and more new areas of application: they are no longer used only for hot wort clarification, trub wort clarification, pre-clarification and polishing and thus for reducing the strain on the filter and also for recovering extract from the tank bottoms; they are also used in the processing of effluent, lye clarification, the recovery of hop extract, in kieselguhr-free beer filtration, in the production of yeast beer, etc., etc. Everything is thus also pointing in the direction of separators and decanters of GEA Westfalia Separator in the next 100 years.

Special publication “100 Years of Beer Separation” has been released
To mark this anniversary, GEA Westfalia Separator has issued a 48-page special publication “100 Years of Beer Separation” which considers the history, the status quo and the future of centrifugal separating technology from a wide range of very interesting angles.