Beer Membrane Filtration System Blog

BREWED TO PERFECTION

The next time you sip a tasty, thirst-quenching beer, you may have Pentair to thank. In breweries around the world, Pentair technology is making it possible for brewers to produce high-quality, great-tasting beer using our Beer Membrane Filtration System. In fact, more than 200 million hectoliters of beer are filtered annually through Pentair’s membrane technology – that’s equivalent to 42 billion glasses of beer.*

As the beer industry continues to grow and consumers develop more discerning palates, breweries of all sizes need partners like Pentair to help them brew the best-tasting beer – consistently, efficiently and sustainably.

WHAT MAKES BEER TASTE BEST?

A complex mix of hops, yeast, water, and other ingredients, great-tasting beer relies on a number of factors – including filtration.

For 20 years, breweries around the world have used the Pentair Beer Membrane Filtration system to help ensure they’re producing clear, mouth-watering beer. Filtration is key to a beer's visual aesthetics, taste, and shelf life, making it an essential step in the brewing process.

The Pentair Beer Membrane Filtration System makes filtration safer and more sustainable than ever before. Pentair’s proprietary membrane technology uses a thin polymer layer with pores that act as a sieve to remove impurities. Clean, clear beer flows through the pores – and ultimately in the kegs, bottles and cans we enjoy.

WHY FILTRATION MATTERS

With a Pentair Beer Membrane Filtration System, brewers can keep up with demand and produce consistent, high-quality brews while optimizing their operations through data-driven decision-making and a flexible design. Here’s how:

• Enhanced filtration process: A dynamic filtration process that adapts to variables such as beer type and volume is required to make beer clear and bright. Pentair’s filtration technology helps produce consistent beer quality with improved taste stability, blocking yeast and reducing beer-spoiling bacteria.

• System reliability and agility: A reliable, optimized filtration system is crucial to creating quality beer while meeting product demand. Over the years, Pentair has advanced our filtration systems to provide solutions for breweries of all sizes, from craft to large production. Our smart filtration systems cater to the needs of the brewery – from handling batch processing to fully automated, continuous filtration – crucial for large breweries to meet market demand while saving time, money, and beer.
  
  And for every brewery, time spent fixing or upgrading systems means less beer produced and less profit. With our flexible technology and team of expert engineers who understand the brewing process from start to finish, we were able to complete a full system upgrade for a large, German brewery in only 25 days – increasing capacity by 50%.

• Smarter decision-making: Pentair’s filtration systems use IoT technology to collect, process, and visualize data. This enables brewers to make more informed, data-driven decisions on how to optimize their filtration process in near real time.

• A more sustainable approach: Before membrane filtration systems, brewers relied on single-use filtration, which produced waste and used chemicals that could be hazardous to humans. Membrane filtration offers a safer, more sustainable option, with reusable membranes that last several years, result in zero filter media waste, and have a lower CO2 footprint. This helps reduce solid waste by 50% and significantly lowers the amount of beer and water loss.
  
  In 2019, Pentair replaced an aged kieselguhr-based primary filtration system at Greene King Brewery in the U.K. Three BMF +FLUX Smart Compact Units were installed, providing gains in reliability and consistency while reducing beer loss. And if there’s a sudden or seasonal increase in demand, all three units can run in batch mode to produce additional beer, helping meet customer demand more sustainably.
  
  

To learn more about the Pentair Beer Membrane Filtration system, check out the Food and Beverage section on Pentair.com.

*Based on an American glass of beer, which is 16 fluid ounces (473ml).