Ask Me Anything with Alfa Laval - Centrifuges!

business development manager in uh uh let's say water team okay or food and water digital business development i think we're live now guys yeah thank everybody for joining us um we're gonna give just a couple minutes we're not gonna waste your time but we'll wait another minute or two and see if some other folks join us um but thank you for joining us today with this uh this facebook live ask me anything brewery centrifuges um this will be a technical discussion um about 15 20 minutes maybe of some slides and then we'll just open it up for for q a if you could um go ahead and use the the comment section to post your questions but i think what we'd like to do is get through the slides first and then go to the questions but you can put the questions in any time we may answer your question in the slides but as soon as the the brief 15 20 minute slide presentation is over we'll go right to the slide to the comments and start taking questions from there and as brief introduction my name is vince palino i'm a regional sales manager for alfa laval covering the northeast and i'm a a craft beer fan and home brewer about 20 years um i remember when we used to call it microbrewery microbrews we also have with us uh chris morgan and jason munoz do you guys want to take a second and just introduce yourselves briefly i'm chris morgan i uh i've been with the company now for one year i'm a field service tech i have eight years of prior brewing experience based in the atlanta area yeah like i said came to alpha about a year ago and working in all breweries my name is jason munoz i've been doing a field service technician job now for just over five years almost six years i came from the brewing industry as well i was a brewer for 10 years up in oregon i'm based on the west coast um but my application is primarily brewery so i travel the country wherever the brewery is wherever the job is we get to it and sheldon do you want to take a second just introduce yourself sure this is uh sheldon young i'm a digital business development manager in the food and water group here at alpha val i've actually my total tenure at alpha val is over 10 years and mechanical engineering my background worked in all kinds of different industries but also live in one of the best beer cities in america richmond virginia very good uh it's about four minutes after 11 so i think we're gonna go ahead and get started uh so we're gonna start with some basic uh theory of centrifugal separation um if you're using right if you don't have a centrifuge now um then to get your yeast and your hop and things to settle out you're basically using time and temperature and that's equivalent to basically the force of gravity which is defined as 1g for comparison if you were to take a bucket and swing it around the swinging arm example here you're generating about five g's of force where if you run through a centrifuge a modern centrifuge you're applying about 10 000 g's of force so you can see the obvious benefits if you're trying to remove solids remove yeast from your beer um what could take you maybe a few days or a week you can do instantly with a centrifuge and just for a quick background gustav d lavalle actually invented centrifuges in 1878 originally for dairy applications separating cream from milk kind of an old timing hand crank type thing shortly after that the company that was alpha laval was the first to bring continuous disc stack centrifuges to market it was originally called the alpha disc because of the shape and if you look in our logo those are actually discs in our logo if you look inside of centrifuge i'll spend a few minutes on this because there's kind of a lot going on but you know everybody says their centrifuge is hermetic but there are different types of of hermetic and what that means one of the most common and popular types is what we call a hydrohermetic centrifuge and the way that the hydrohermetic centrifuge works is your beer will come in the top through a feed pipe into the distribution chamber where you start to pick up the speed okay the bowls spin about 5000 rpms to generate that 10 000 g's so we got to get it moving pretty quick you start to speed it up here this is where you'll start to see a little bit of shear stress we fill the bowl from the bottom although it's top fed all the bowls fill up from the bottom and then as the the beer enters the centrifuge here the solids come into contact with the discs which are these diagonal things and this photo over here is a picture of all the discs stacked on top of each other and the discs aid in helping the solids settle out so the solids will hit the disc they will slide down and they will collect in the periphery of the bowl at in what we call the solid space or the sludge space solids are spun out and your clarified beer exits out the top of the centrifuge so you come in the top fill the bowl solid spin out exit out the top hydrohermetic refers to a water seal at the top you can see there's a little bit of blue up here and that will help prevent do pickup through the centrifuge it helps if this is dearated water you can also blanket it with you can pump some co2 in there to keep your geo pickup levels low with a hydrohermetic machine basically as the solids fill up you'll do a an intermittent discharge where the bowl the bowl is actually two pieces here the bottom will drop it'll create a vacuum of space for the solids to be flung out and then the ball closes again this all happens in milliseconds during that discharge you'll notice a do spike and this is when we talk about geo pickup through a centrifuge this is normally where you see it during a do or during a discharge you'll see a do spike the slower you're on the machine uh the longer it takes to fill up the bowl when you do a discharge you're going to vacate some of the beer in the bowl and the slower you run it the longer it takes to fill it back up and so that will affect your spike the slower you run it the more the oil you pick up the faster you run it the less deo you pick up the example we use is through if you have like a bucket and say you want to fill a bucket with water from the top you're going to see some splashing some some deal pick up there alpha level also offers an improvement on this we call it the axial hermetic it's actually a mechanical seal it works the same in principle but you don't need the um the hydrohermetic seal you don't need do you don't need dirt water for low dissolved oxygen pickup um something else to mention here on all centrifuges when it exits through the centrifuge it exits through a um this this this this radial disc uh this is a fixed basically it acts as a pump wheel but it's fixed so the beer gets pushed through here to get out as the beer pushes through you're going to get some friction the friction is the cause for any temperature pickup that you might see and maybe a little bit more stress on the beer as it exits another type of centrifuge that's available is a fully hermetic bottom fed and if the example of the hydrohermetic is you're coming in through the top of your bucket fully hermetic you enter through the bottom so it's a bottom fed fully hermetic machine you come in through the bottom you fill the bucket you exit out the top once the bucket's full you have a fully hermetic chamber so in principle up here again you're feeding it from the bottom the same theory bowl fills from the bottom cells are spun out exit through the top and this technology the radial disc actually spins which lowers your friction which lowers your temperature pickup and your stress and as it's fully hermetic you know it's capable of zero dissolved oxygen pickup but these are when we talk about centrifuges these are the the primary technology that you'll see in the market today so why use a centrifuge traditionally you'd want to increase your quality or shelf life and stability and that's through basically removing yeast there's not a lot of styles or of beer where yeast is acceptable in the final product so traditionally a centrifuge should be used to remove the yeast and historically a a bright beer was a sign of of quality of the beer right as brewers have experimented with more dry hops in recent years that has shifted a bit and as consumers prefer the hoppier styles of beers that are out there it's kind of changed the purpose or the use of a centrifuge and a lot of folks have instead of the you know i don't make bright beer they intentionally want to make hazy beer which you can absolutely do with the centrifuge and the focus is more um not that they're not focusing on quality because we all focus on quality the focus is more on the yield recovery with the quality right and if you're using a lot of dry hops you've probably seen that your your yields are lower and your losses are higher so a lot of folks that are looking for centrifuge they look for it because they want to be able to increase their yield there are a lot of different things that affect the yield increase but we would say most customers see somewhere between five to fifteen percent of a yield increase it depends on a lot of things depends on the recipe of the beer depends on your current sop depends on the the centrifuge that you have i'm not necessarily going to get into the details there but that kind of gives you a ballpark of how much yield increase you could expect some customers are also looking to reduce their settling time especially during the summer if it's very busy you're looking to turn your tanks faster what we say is once you decide the beer is ready you don't have to wait any additional settling time you can run the beer through the centrifuge to remove your solids and take it onto packaging or filtration or whatever else you're going to do again that settling time is dependent on how long you're waiting now if you're waiting two weeks you can shave off quite a bit if you're only waiting a couple days you may not reduce it as much again it's specific to your specific application and your beer and your sop another reason to use the centrifuge is is to dial in your clarity or haze if you're looking to make a very bright style loggers pilsners something like that you'll run it through the the centrifuge to remove that yeast to get that clarity that you're looking for if you're looking to make a hazy beer both these beers and these photos were run through one of our centrifuges so you see you can make that hazy new england with the centrifuge the haze in the new england is really you guys are understand the chemistry better than i do but the haze from the new englands is really both from the dry hopping the protein polyphenol haze that you get but also from the the malt bill right those oats um those those wheats um are giving the the haze in there uh both these beers in the photo were run through a centrifuge so you can make both bright and hazy beer with the centrifuge shooting for the haze spec that that you're looking for something else that has come up recently is reducing hop burn this is that a syringe astringency that you get when you use very high pounds per barrel in the dry hop and if you leave it there for more than a few days again i'm not the expert on the chemistry um but what customers have seen is maybe they've they've moved to a centrifuge because they want to increase the yield and they've learned that you know when they run it through the machine they can speed up that hot burn process by about two weeks instead of letting the beer sit in um an aging tank waiting for the hot burn to um to succeed and they can run through a centrifuge and it removes it very quickly for them and that's really due to the the extra the chlorophylls i guess um when you dry hop at such high amounts for a certain amount of time a centrifuge can remove that out of the beer instead of it settling in your aging tank later and more recently a lot of the work that tom schellhammer did here in the space minimizing hop creep and this is where um again when you're dry hopping in enough uh quantities uh there are enzymes in the hops that if there are residual sugars left over you can actually get like another fermentation and it's low level enough that it will affect your your final gravity but it will also kick off some vdks diacetyl acetaldehyde and as fermentation is complete often there's not enough yeast left over to clean that up and you could be left with that in your your final product so you could also use a centrifuge to to do a couple things you can get the beer off the yeast quicker to help prevent that or you can once you do dry hop you can run it through the centrifuge shortly after the dry hop to prevent that that hop creep from occurring uh so common brewery applications um we a lot of people describe it differently we describe it as uh clarification and polishing uh clarifying would be uh this glass on the left where you're trying to remove uh the big heavy stuff but you're gonna do something else with the beer later maybe you're going to run through a filter or some finding agents or something whereas polishing on the right is you know you're looking for that very bright style of beer and you want to get out as much as you can what most people are are interested in is the tank bottom recovery again looking for that yield improvement um there's different ways to do it um a lot of folks have a bottom uh port and a racking arm you can use the racking arm to get more into the fluff to recover a lot of that extra beer there are more advanced techniques where you can actually blend the tank bottoms with brighter beer up top to get some yield recovery and in certain applications again an advanced technique you can actually run straight tank bottoms to a centrifuge to recover that beer you still have to remove the heaviest stuff by dumping it out after you've harvested we say if you can't get it through a pipe you can't get it through a pump you're not going to get it through a centrifuge so again it's a little bit more advanced but there's different ways that you can process those tank bottoms to recover beer with the centrifuge so most suppliers now will offer a completely skidded system and this is an example of one here you can see it's it's on a skid base sometimes there's wheels sometimes there's not although you would normally leave this center fusion one place and not move it it does spin about five thousand rpms so every time you move it you have to level it set it um otherwise you could potentially damage the machine and get some uh you start getting vibration sensor errors too so centrifuge intended to be in one place but typically it's provided as a complete skid mounted system uh you're gonna get the centrifuge which you see here you're gonna get your motor your gear drive or belt drive in some instances you're going to get your control panel and then you'll get some piping and things it's basically where you just bring utilities and process to the skid and you're good to go your utilities will include electricity service water and some applications you may require plant air and again if you have a hydro hermetic machine you may also require durated water or co2 but some options that you'll find commonly offered with a centrifuge would be outlet turbidity discharge triggering this is a outlet turbidity meter on the outlet of the machine where it will sense when the solid space is full and it will automatically trigger a discharge for you the standard is to do a timed discharge with your outlet turbidity you can better determine what your outlet clarity or haze level is but you can also use it to better manage your yield improvement by not doing a discharge until your solid space is is essentially full you may also see automatic capacity control this is a inlet turbidity meter combined with an automatic flow control valve where the machine will sense what the inc incoming inlet turbidity is which translates to how many solids you're feeding it and it will automatically ramp up or slow down that inlet valve to correspond so you don't overwhelm the machine if you you pack too much solids and you fill the solid space then you're going to solids into the discs and you can clog the machine and you don't ever want to have to clog a centrifuge some other some other options are the varying bowl speed the biggest tool in your toolbox for dialing in your your outlet clarity or your haze is going to be flow rate that's going to get you most of the way there in some applications if you want to dial in or tweak it a little bit you can change how fast the ball spins i talked about you know 5000 rpms 6000 rpms you can change that a little bit that's really kind of tweaking it once you're most of the way there um but the biggest tool in your toolbox is your your your flow rate um but varying bowl speed is an option that's available to kind of help you get there and some beer styles were a yeast is expected and acceptable like half of license um you might look at a bypass blending option where basically you're you have a pipe around this the centrifuge where you're not running 100 of the beer through the centrifuge and again that's intended for beer styles like heffalyson where yeast character is expected in the final style and you don't want to remove all of it through the centrifuge but you do want to control the level and maybe you want to see some yield recovery you'll also see recirculation and the idea here is when you do a discharge you're going to disrupt the equilibrium in the bowl and during a discharge you may pass some solids through the outlet or some yeast that you don't want and you may find that later on in your bright beer tank or your aging tank so the idea for circulation is during this discharge you recirculate some of that outlet back to the inlet to try to pick up that that little bit that passes through you are subjecting the beer to to to the shear stress the do pick up the temperature pickup during recirculation so not everybody offers it but it is something that that you see out there for maintenance and service i'm going to turn it over to jason munoz to talk just for a minute and then i think after that we're going to get into some questions yeah just the uh biggest thing here anytime you buy a piece of equipment for the brewery you want to maintain it make sure that it runs properly uh for a lot of folks who depend on the centrifuge it becomes um you know it becomes depended on every day and so if you have one go down due to lack of maintenance um it could be a big deal to shut down a brewery because now you're not emptying fermentors you've got a you know packaging team waiting for beer it's not there so really there's a schedule of maintenances on the machines outlined in the manual but typically what we do is we come in either chris or i will be there no we have a few other techs that work in brewery but chris and i are primarily brewery uh we'll come in we'll tear apart the machine we'll uh we'll inspect it look and see you know are we doing a good job cipping did we have a potential uh plugging other machine at one time i just make sure that all the mechanical features are working properly um and again that would follow that that kind of maintenance schedule that's outlined in the uh the manual not everyone sticks to the manual because breweries are using the machines differently than than just a general purpose uh or a seasonal work machine so we'll talk about that as we're going through the the journey and then uh also with just like your car oil changes are important you know just making sure that if we're not gonna abide by the the book exactly that uh we are at least doing oil changes to keep all the lubricated items on the drive side working properly so that you don't have a major failure or anything like that but uh typically uh the minor service is a day on site and the major service which is where we look at all the drive train stuff is a two-day job um and then you know we kind of take every every hurdle as we get and get over it and like i said it's a journey so uh it's it's important for the machine it's important for training as well so that you can see the inner workings and realize that the machine is not a black box and uh just helps your understanding all the way through that's excellent thank you very much jason um so that concludes our our presentation and i think at this point um we're open to take any questions that anybody may have ask me anything ask us anything and thanks for putting the emails and stuff there so sheldon do we have anything to uh to cover just yet let's see here now we had a couple questions that came in you know i think andrew was gonna hop on let's see he had a couple all right bear with me one second okay let's see can i i think we covered this a little bit can i still make hazy beers um absolutely um i think we talked about that uh what about a um centrifuge versus a filter how does that work can i use this energy instead of a filter yeah that's that's a pretty common question actually um so we would say a centrifuge is not a filter a filter is usually defined as a piece of media that has a specific cutoff value maybe 5 10 20 microns something like that so i think the technical definition of centrifuge is not a filter because it's not a piece of media and it doesn't have a specific micron cut off so often people ask what size cut off can you get through a centrifuge it really depends on the size of the particle uh and also the difference um and weights between the particle and um the liquid that it's with in this case beer which is is pretty close to water right so it's probably somewhere around five micron that um a centrifuge would limit itself at um but we would call it more of a classifier because the centrifuge you can take up in flow rate or down in the flow rate and by changing the flow rate you can affect what you're actually pulling out so if you run it super fast you're not going to have as much resonance time in the bowl and you're not going to pull out as many things as if you run it slowly and you have more residence time in the bowl and there's more time to pull things out so we would depending on what you're trying to do a bright or a hazy you can run the machine in such a way to kind of hit what you're looking for so we would not call it a filter you can certainly use one upstream of the filter uh to reduce loading to that filter if um if you're running a de or a plate and frame or something else and and you're constantly clogging it and have to stop mid-run you can certainly put a centrifuge in front to do the heavy lifting and then still run a filter and people will ask that too about um you know my pilsner and my logger do i do i can i get rid of my filter if i have one of these it's really up to you um what we recommend is you run the centrifuge and you look at the outlet and if it has the brightness you know the visual look that you want if uh you're happy with the yeast counts um then really it's your call but um you know certainly a lot of people put a centrifuge in front of an existing filter uh for their brighter styles and there are some benefits there great a couple more here i'm gonna take a little out of order uh one this is a short one what's the footprint of the centrifuge typically and we have different sizes right yeah it depends our smallest the smallest one that we offer is like two and a half feet by five feet so it's it's pretty small um and again these are all these are these skid mounted systems um what size brewery would that go with uh that would like um probably less than 5 000 barrels a year if you're fermentors or maybe 15 barrels or smaller something that small would work for you one of our more popular skid mounted ones is about um i think it's three and a half feet by six feet but i mean we sell huge um centrifuges that uh you actually have to pour a concrete pad for and they can get brew systems right now yeah they can get they can get pretty big so yeah um but that'd be the smallest that you're looking at and they kind of they go up from there okay um i'm gonna take this one next time i see one andrew posted one as well um what temperature caustic do you recommend this maybe a service question or maybe not what temperature costing you recommend my experience is hot caustic 150 fahrenheit with edta once every 24 hours of run time that was a question 150 is a great temp i always ran a hot caustic on the tail end of my transfer so i would rent my centrifuge after my transfer and then follow it up with about a 45-minute caustic 150 is a great temp uh i wouldn't go really higher than 175 180 kind of creeping on a too hot of a temp uh hit the machine they fight back and they get a little angry at you but that 150 to 160 range is is well within the operation uh parameters of the machine great and in terms of uh just real quick in terms of you know your comment to every 24 hours uh if you're running 24 hours yes i'd say that once within the 24 hour cycle you should stop and run a cip typically with the smaller units you're talking about running a tank maybe two tanks a day and then after those uh transfers are done you just break it down run a cip and uh and then rinse it and shut it down for the day all right so it's more so it's either time run time or you do a couple of batches and you move on but then yeah yeah some of the wineries i go once they go and do uh full harvest they're running the machines around the clock and they'll stop at either an 18 to 24 hour window and run a caustic on the machine before going back online for product but these are big machines that run around the clock larger macro breweries they do about the same where they're they're breaking uh within 24 hours they have to run a cip the the uh the programming won't allow them to continue running product without doing that so um yeah cool great um and someone commented with three barrels looking at some other equipment yeah absolutely if if you're just a person that commented on the three bear looking at six barrel reach out to us if you just have questions or just want an idea of what that stuff's gonna look like for you uh you know vince and the team can give you just some some ballpark stuff to get you thinking on it if you just reach out to one of the emails here vince is at the top there okay so let's see andrew had a question up top here do i need daw or co2 for my centrifuge um it depends on what you have right um what is your aw for those of you yeah uh dw is de-aerated water it's uh it's water that has had excess oxygen stripped out of it so usually very low level like less than 10 ppb something like that and there's different ways that you can make that i won't cover that here but do you need deer to water or co2 for your centrifuge um if you have a hydro-hermetic machine you know the hydro refers to the water seal um you you will see lower d.o pickup levels if you are feeding it derated water or co2 and again that is to drive out the the excess oxygen because during a discharge um you're going to suck in some of that water and that's where you're going to see your your d.o spike so if you have a hydro hermetic machine or you're looking at one um i would recommend that you consider derated water for the seal to reduce udl pickup levels a fully hermetic or an actual hermetic it does not require co2 or deodated water because it does not have a hydrohermetic seal excellent okay let's see there's another one i popped in here on me here can i run a sour beer through a centrifuge it's an interesting one um yeah you certainly can um if it's a kettle sour i mean anything that could potentially infect it um it's presumably going to be killed and gone uh by the time it hits the centrifuge um if you're gonna run um like a barrel aged sour or something from a food fooder then i would be concerned about all the o-rings and gaskets that it's going to come in contact going through a centrifuge and if you can adequately get those cleaned before you run a normal beer so um customers that that have sour programs oftentimes you'll see they have two machines where they'll have one centrifuge for the normal beer and if the the sour program is big enough and they're doing you know barrel-aged towers or fooders they'll have a second center for years dedicated to that uh just to minimize the contamination but again if it's a kettle sour you know once you've soured it you're bringing it back up to boil to kill all that stuff um you should be fine good good all right let's post another one here from another member uh this is really kind of an adjunct can i run this is an interesting one because can i run a few fruit purees through my centrifuge or something like coffee beer so like adjuncts you know we get a lot of fruit here in richmond we have several breweries that love the fruit puree so i'm curious about this one as well because uh i don't know like trying to think which ones use them here in richmond yeah you absolutely can and that's actually um the fruit puree in particular is actually a really good um use the whereas hops are pretty dry and they actually absorb some beer the fruit puree actually comes with a bit of of liquid with it right so oftentimes customers will run a free puree and they're like yeah my yield was 100 it's like well it's it's you were adding liquid to it so it made up for some of the loss from from the hops or otherwise but yeah you can run for puree and if um if i go back to to this okay what often happens you know these discs you can kind of tell here but they're really close together so when you have um like the the the fruit solids your hop solids um what usually happens is when they come in they get spun out to the solid space before they ever hit the disc stack so they're big enough that they're going to get spun out and um and you'll definitely see some um some yield improvement there um and the coffee it does kind of matter whether it's a fine grind or a coarse grind um but the same theory in principle as they they get spun out before they ever get to the disc stack um they are a little bit more advanced application and i don't know if jason or chris you want to talk to it but it's you do need to be pretty familiar with your machine and and have some experience in running it before you run those because anytime you're adding a whole bunch of solids you do risk clogging the disc stack um and anybody who's ever had a disc cleaning party can tell you they they would prefer not to do that um but you can't absolutely do it but it is it does require a little bit more conversation and a good understanding of how the machine works so jason and chris i don't know if you want to add anything actually let me ask a quick clarify yeah clarifying questions because i should go go ahead jason yeah chris yeah just just uh like vince said an understanding of how to operate the machine first is vital because typically someone calls with a hey i'm thinking about running a pumpkin puree or a coffee beer it's like you that the solids are heavy they will separate but it's it acts differently than yeast so i always uh you know i tell them to start out with short discharge intervals first to see what's coming out if it comes out too beery then we can start extending that interval out and filling the solid space more but it's just a matter of uh training and understanding of what centrifuge is trying to do chris you got something in my time i had good yield increases when i would blend from the cone starting off with the racking arm and then running off the racking arm while blending the heavy the heavy puree from the bottom and with the the lighter clear beer up top throughout the extent of the transfer uh that said you have to be very careful and watch watch what you're doing because like jason said it's very possible to clog the machine yeah and this is where it's it's really good to have a good um rapport with your field service techs where you can call them or the sales guy you can call and ask cam thinking of doing this you know what tips or advice can you provide very good very good um and just the question i had is like when you do put a fruit beer through a centrifuge what is the resulting beer going to be because some of the beers i've gotten that are fruity are really really pulpy like they want the pulp in it if that's a result would you not run it through a centrifuge um versus when you would jason i i mean if you if you want the pulp in your final product i'd say let's not run it right skip it that was my assumption right i was just kidding what the result would be one of our larger applications in centrifuge technology is orange juice so we make machines that that remove pulp from from juice and that's you know not what the machines are designed for primarily in brewing but they can do it and and it just takes that uh sort of conservative um as i tell a customer you know get your database uh of running first before you start throwing purees and right and uh you know extensive dry hopping at it just learn a machine learn what it wants what it likes what it doesn't like and then you can start really uh stretching its legs a little bit and learning how to run it with some uh heavier solid material and part of your your commissioning should be um training right from an operator um that's what jason and chris do all day right is you know you'll have those beer ready and you'll tell them i want to run a lager i want to run double dry hot to ipa and i got a fruit puree and they will run that with you and help you like jason says start to build your database but start to understand how to run it through the machine that should be a part of your commissioning is getting some training on how to run um those specific styles of beer for you one thing i'll mention too about the fruit puree or double dry hop you know if if your customer is expecting you know a layer of stuff in the bottom of the can when they're done you're not necessarily going to get that with a centrifuge some people want that some people don't want that but that's kind of the point of the center for yours is to remove most of that stuff so that you're getting you know a stable beer when you're done you can run it inefficiently and still end up with with some stuff at the bottom but it's really personal preference and you see that a lot with the double dry hopped but especially like sheldon was talking about the um the fruit purees if you know you're expecting that down there then um you can run it inefficiently to to get some um but in most cases you know people don't want that in there long term um because it could affect the the long term um right there those beers aren't usually ones you're you're leaving out very long you've pretty much drink them up before they explode [Laughter] yeah so um that's actually an interesting question you know one one thing i've heard from people with centrifuges before is maybe they're intimidated by them because they're pretty you know high-speed machines and all this but they don't know about how much training does it take to run one yeah it's a it's a big expensive hunk of stainless steel right um jason chris what are i mean you guys have run machines before and you train people all day what's the learning curve like yeah when when i go on a commissioning and do a training obviously i want to run as much beer with the customer as i can uh ideally i can run three tanks that's the best case scenario sometimes i've had scenarios where i can run more others not so much running three pilsners in a week is not very helpful for the customer ideally like you touched on having a ddh a pilsner logger and something else in between and there is a nice uh opportunity for the customer to see what exactly the machine can do and kind of get comfortable with the parameters and how to adjust them accordingly but that's uh ideally for me three is uh is a good number and the customers usually pick up on that and they're able to run once once you've walked out through them correct yeah yeah it's similar um learning curve is typically there's uh in the brewery if you are in a brewery or of the like-mindedness of all of us and and uh it's training put your putting your hands on it figuring out like all right you know usually my my training goes let me run this first beer and i'll explain what i'm doing then the second tank i'll uh i'll start to step back and let the customers start pushing buttons and pulling valves and turning valves whatever it might be and then by the third hopefully if everything is going well i try to keep my hands in my pockets and let the customer do all of the the work again because a lot of these a lot of the folks are like myself and chris uh anyone in a brewery is really a hands-on learner you can tell them all you want you can show them in the manual but it's it's not going to stick unless they start uh running hose pulling pulling valves open and closed and absolutely doing all that stuff right and i know i know i'll i'll say this because because i know what our service team is always there to help right whenever there's a question after we've commissioned a machine um they had something they just call and and uh we can we can help them out uh with things like that and that's what i was going to say too is you yeah that's where it helps to have a relationship with the tech that has brewery process knowledge right where you can call them or text them with questions and um and also put a plug to for the service um you know we would usually recommend that if you're not familiar with centrifuge you bring our guys back to do the intermediate major services that jason spoke about earlier because it's also an opportunity to get more training right they will train you how to service the machine they will often appreciate the extra set of hands to help them um but they'll train you as they do it and then our more experienced customers will you know they can perform their own services great but it is an opportunity to get some training and even um the the really big guys that have teams of maintenance to maintain their machines they still bring our guys in every once in a while um for that training for those reminders and things so it's it really helps to have a good relationship with your commissioning agent or the tax or if if the the sales guy can help you out to kind of learn and get comfortable yeah i get another question down here at the bottom how much does the vfd cost impact a project and can you add a vfd after the fact um i i'm not sure uh i assume that refers to a vfd for a feed pump is that how you guys read that too i was uh i read it as a vfd for a main motor um but i'm not sure let's see what uh yeah i mean is it standard with ours or no a vfd for the main motor yes it's standard right so it it's the you need it with the machine right yeah and it will just get it's part of the the cost of the machine yeah via vfd for the uh for a feed pump after the fact is uh it's not much it's not much no if it's we're talking feed pumps yeah you certainly can add a vfd to a feed pump as long as the pump is ready for that what kind of i'm sorry adventure thought sorry oh so he's he just clarified main motor it depends on the motor if the motor if the motor is wound as a wide delt with dart that has two sets of windings you you it's my understanding you can't add a vfd to it and so you'd have to get another motor for the machine um i could be wrong on that i'm i'm like 80 to 85 percent sure that but uh i haven't i haven't seen that happen before where someone adds a vfd to a white delta motor um yeah we'd have to look at all the all that stuff but yeah usually a vfd motor is wound as such to be driven either by direct power or by uh vfd driven power yeah but i think you could just come with it right so again our centrifuges come with the vfd new units new units will come with a vfd right right clarifying that yeah well yeah we have uh we have some old stock out there that um could use an upgrade to vfds for power savings but again it cost a lot of money to to change out the motors to get the electrical uh swapped out on the drives and everything like that so it's it's a it's a big project usually yeah and you mentioned a feed pump um what kind of feed pump is typically being used for a centrifuge and movement says sounds obvious that we need a feed pump for this what do people use and how is that typically set up yeah that's a good question um before i answer that i just want to say to the the user that asked the question about the vfd if you email us directly if you have a specific question we'll be happy to get a um a more accurate answer i don't know if you have one of our um our machines now and it's something you're looking to add or if it's but if you have a specific question reach out to any of us and we'll get you an answer um but the sheldon's question um the uh just a standard centrifugal pump um often you know a lot of the breweries they already have um cellar pumps on carts um you can use any of those to feed the centrifuge you can also feed a centrifuge um depending on the size uh with just tank pressure um some breweries they just they don't want to pump but maybe they want a centrifuge you can use tank pressure to feed it but if you use tank pressure in the fermenter to feed your centrifuge and not use a pump you're going to be limited to the flow rate that comes out of of the tank right one of the benefits of the bottom fed machine is it's got a wider operating range so you can run lower flow rates higher flow rates than a hydrohermetic of the same size so you depending on the machine you have and the flow that you're coming out at you don't need a feed pump to feed the centrifuge but again assuming it works you're going to be stuck at a flow rate and the biggest tool you have the control clarity your haze is flow rate so you're kind of going to be stuck with what you have there so the large majority of applications customers will have a seller pump on a cart that they'll use to feed the centrifuge alpha level also makes pumps so we can provide them if you want a dedicated pump for your centrifuge you don't want to be fighting for a cellar pump because it's used someplace else but just a standard centrifugal pump will work and i'll talk for a second about the solids the solids coming out oftentimes you'll be near a drain so you can just direct it towards the drain with the hose or maybe you put a bucket you drag it over some bigger applications or bigger machines um we'll we can actually provide a positive displacement pump to move those solids someplace else so you don't necessarily need a solid receiving pump pd pump to move the solids depending on the size machine you have and what you're doing with those solids how close you are to a drain but we would definitely recommend just a standard brewery centrifugal pump on the inlet of the machine at jason or chris you guys have anything to add just to touch on real quick uh if you do go with the pro carb option which is the inline carb that we're now offering on the machines you do have to have a feed pump you do have to have a a minimum of an inlet pressure of 3 bar which is obviously not attainable by tank pressure so you have to have a centrifugal pump in line that's all i wanted to say yeah that's a good clarification on our machines we offer inline carbonation and to meet the because otherwise the co2 leaks back into the fermenter right so you have to have enough pressure on the front which means you need a centrifugal pump if you have onboard inline carbonation very good well guys um do we have any other questions out there guys anything again it's ask us anything so uh we'd love to hear from you if you have anything uh additional about centrifuges or um we also do other equipment at alpha valley we didn't really touch on that today but um we we have a whole a range of brewery equipment that uh we hit upon it which uh vince is very well aware of and the teams we're very well aware of and can can uh chat about you if you visit our website at alphabet.us if you go to brewery uh you can see a whole range of things just for craft brewery so if you guys have questions of any of that stuff um feel free to to contact us via email but that's i think we've pretty much hit everything in the list here i'll stay on a couple minutes to see if anyone else is anything else but guys great job yeah thank you it was a pleasure to be here and and i hope folks found it informative and um you know please reach out to us directly with with any clarifying questions or um you know oftentimes it's easier just to get on the phone um but if you shoot us an email um and we can try to reply by email or maybe get on the phone or however you guys prefer but um you know we're here to help and educate so please let us know how we can help great all right i think that's it guys thanks for joining us from all around the u.s and thank you andrew and the craft beer facebook page for for joining us so appreciate it thanks everybody thank you

Channel: Craft Beer Professionals

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Id: FZRft3M1Pas

Length: 50min 6sec (3006 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020