Brewery eliminates filter cleaning stoppages with the Self-Cleaning Russell Eco Filter®
Windsor & Eton Brewery opened in 2010, almost 80 years since the last brewery in Windsor closed. The U.K. company now brews over 1.2 million pints of beer annually across a wide range of styles and packages into casks, kegs, bottles, and cans. The beverages have won over 90 major international, national, and regional awards.
The brewery supplies beer to trade customers in pubs, bars, and restaurants locally, towards Reading in the west and into central London. It also runs a taproom and shop on site and a pub in Eton – The George. The brewery has also collaborated with breweries in Australia, Europe, South Africa, South America, and North America.
Keg, can, and bottle products are filtered during beer production to remove hop material and yeast slurry. In all cases, coarse filtration at 100 microns is necessary, for which the brewery used a small 30-centimeter cylindrical metal filter in-line. However, the metal in-line filter had a low capacity and short time before blockage occurred.
As a result, the brewery had to frequently stop the beer transfer operation and clean the filter before continuing the filling process. The impact of repeated cleaning of the filter during a filling operation was as much as 15 minutes of downtime each hour.
After Windsor & Eton Brewery switched to the Self-Cleaning Russell Eco Filter®, it eliminated downtime for filter cleaning. The solids waste valve allows operators to continuously remove waste without stopping.
Windsor & Eton Brewery now passes approximately 420,000 liters through the machine annually. The brewery has estimated that using the Russell Finex filter will avoid about 40 hours of non-productive downtime for filter cleaning each year. A further benefit is that the operational life of the cartridge filters has been extended, giving the brewery a potential saving of £2k per year.
The brewery also plans to look into using the Self-Cleaning Russell Eco Filter® to help clarify the beer. As a result, a beer that would take 11 days to be ready for bottling can instead be ready in 8 days. By freeing up the fermentation vessel sooner for the next batch, the brewery has the opportunity to expand its capacity by 25%.
About Russell Finex
Founded in 1934, Russell Finex is a specialist global supplier of sieving and filtration equipment. With its head office in the U.K. and subsidiaries in Belgium, the U.S.A., India, and China the company supplies to over 140 countries.
To speak to an experienced sales engineer to improve your productivity, contact Russell Finex today.
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"At all stages of the process, through trialing of a test unit to designing and fabricating our machine, the team at Russell Finex have endeavored to really understand our processes and needs. They have actively supported us with the testing and trialing of various filtration options.”
