Chamber Pasteurizers

[DancingCamel]

We're looking for a chamber pasteurizer for pasteurizing our bottled beers. We've been doing this for a while using existing tanks and hardware (no, it's not fun) but I'm now considering buying/fabricating a unit for this purpose. If anybody has experience working on these and can help with some basic specs (size, number of bottles, typical # of pu's, spray or bath, cycle time, heating/cooling method, etc.) I'd really appreciate it. Certainly pics would be a huge help.

Thanks.

David
Dancing Camel Brewing Co., Ltd.
Tel Aviv, Israel

[dick murton]

Have a look at a couple of web sites from the big equipment manufacturers such as Krones and Simonazzi. Although they will not give dimensions, because they are obviously dependant upon throughput, they give diagrams of the heating and cooling phases, and water transfers between sections in the passie.

I am sure there are smaller companies providing them, but probably not with such high levels of control, but they will then be cheaper. The temperature and time of the high temperature holding sections are inter-related and vary according to the number of pasteurisation units (PUs) the beer needs, which is dependant upon the hygiene of the beer pre-pasteurisation and the shelf life you want to give the beer. i.e the lower the bug count in the beer, the fewer the PUs it will need to give it an acceptable shelf life, and generally (but not always) long shelf life beers are treated with slightly higher PUs (say up to 5 extra) than short shelf life beer.

Typical PUs range from 10 to 25, though there are plenty outside this range.

Cheers

[jason.koehler]

Hi David,

My last employer used chamber immersion pasteurization, and it was incredibly inefficient and overly expensive. I worked hard to convince my boss to move to a different system, but we never did. The company is out of business now if that tells you anything :)

Our chamber was a stainless tank with some standard fittings for brewers hose at the base and midpoint of the tank with standard ball lock valves for easy opening/closing. An upper fitting was also attached and worked as sort of a sprinkler system, though during my year and a half there we never used it. Sorry, no pictures! We could fit 9 cases of 35 bottles in it at once, so roughly 13 standard cases could be done at a time.

Our procedure was to heat water in the brewhouse to 75 C and then opened the bottom of the chamber to let the water in. We filled to the top, and monitored the temperature of a dummy bottle that was filled with water of similar temperature as the bottled beer and had a temperature probe in it with a rubber stopper to keep the water out.

Once we hit around 62-64C in the dummy bottle, we'd stop putting water in (we let the water keep overflowing slightly since the bottles were filled with cold beer and were cooling the tank) and let them sit for 20-30 mins at that temp. After that, we'd then put in city water from the bottom again to start pushing out the hot water and slowly bring the temp down to 20 C or so. Once that was hit, we'd pull the beer out and let them dry overnight, the next day rolling them over to the labeling area. In a rush, we'd use the CLT, though we broke a few bottles doing that...usually less than 1 per batch though.

We used a similar technique for pasteurizing kegs as well. We'd blow a stem valve in maybe 1 in ever 200 we did, and that was scary! There were a few big dents in the ceiling where they flew off, and some big dings in the stainless covering plate we put over it as well.

I think there are far better ways to do pasteurization than this, and in fact there was a quite lengthy thread I started sometime last year on the subject while exploring new ways of doing it. Getting a second heat exchanger and doing a hot run followed by a cold run through the second HE comes to mind as one viable option that was suggested by many on these boards. Just run the beer out of your tank, through the dueling HE's, and then into a bright tank, bottle from there once you've reached desired co2 levels, and no worry about further pasteurization.