A German brewery known for its lagers, hefeweizens and golden beers has reduced the time needed for yeast harvesting by between six to seven hours each week after adopting new pump technology.

Licher Brewery, part of the Bitburger Brewery Group, is based in Lich, Germany and employs a team of 250 making it the largest brewery in the area.

Producing Licher and Benediktiner beers near Frankfurt in Germany it has now replaced two centrifugal pumps with a different type of technology.

The brewery has employed a Certa Compact 300 pump from MasoSine, which now performs the work previously carried out by two centrifugal pumps, resulting in a quicker production process and lower energy consumption. 

It transfers yeast from 6-10 fermentation tanks to yeast storage tanks or waste handling systems and also provides strong suction to transfer thick yeast approximately 100 metres, while also protecting yeast viability with its gentle handling, low-shear sinusoidal technology. 

Previously, transferring high-viscosity yeast with two centrifugal pumps took 8-10 hours. With the Certa pump, the same task takes just 2-3 hours. The Certa pump handles yeasts with a dry solids content of 12-22% at flow rates of 20-40 hL/h. 

Sascha Kläs, master brewer at Licher Brewery, explained: “It is important for us to be able to handle both our bottom-fermenting yeasts with high viscosity and our top-fermenting yeasts with low viscosity equally well. This also allows us to flexibly control the speed based on other process parameters, such as temperature.

“Thanks to the Certa pump’s improved suction capacity, we can efficiently remove thick yeast even through our very long piping runs.

“With the centrifugal pump we used previously, a mobile auxiliary/booster pump was necessary just to achieve any flow at all in tanks with long piping runs. The Certa pump handles this task easily on its own without any issues.”