Australian beverage manufacturer Bundaberg Brewed Drinks recently outgrew its production facility, and to ensure it maintained product quality at its new master brewery, the company installed a new cooker and thermalizer from HRS Heat Exchangers.

Established by the Fleming family in Queensland in 1968, Bundaberg Brewed Drinks has grown throughout its history as demand for its non-alcoholic soft drinks has expanded. Evolving from a local supplier to an international brewed beverage manufacturer, the Bundaberg Ginger Beer brand has become widely recognizable with its distinctive glass stubby bottle and rip cap lid.

Increased demand in recent years meant that Bundaberg’s previous manufacturing facility was no longer large enough, and so it invested in a new greenfield project that would provide the company with the necessary space to accommodate future growth. Bundaberg entrusted long-term collaborator M. E. Engineering, a process engineering company and systems integrator, with delivering new production equipment.

The ginger beer brewing process includes key stages such as grinding the dried ginger root, making the wort, fermenting with yeast, maturing and then mixing into the final recipe, before being filtered and bottled. Many of these stages require the ingredients or product to be heated or cooled. Bundaberg turned to HRS to supply heat exchangers to provide hot water, clean-in-place (CIP) solutions and product heating and cooling throughout the brewery.

“One of our key considerations is ensuring the consistency of our product,” says Matt Brain, project manager, Bundaberg Brewed Drinks. “That means making sure the heating and cooling processes are reliably uniform, so that our ginger beer has the same familiar taste in every batch.”

In particular, the HRS cooker and thermalizer are an integral part of Bundaberg’s Ginger Beer fermentation process, heating and cooling wort as required. Both turnkey systems were supplied on process skids to facilitate installation and maintenance and are based around the HRS MI and MR Series of corrugated tube heat exchangers.

The cooker system, which is designed to process up to 20.5 tons of product each hour, uses steam to raise the product temperature above 212°F. This is achieved in two stages, using an HRS MR Series heat exchanger with direct heat recovery and reusing the heat removed when the product is cooled after cooking. A final cooling stage using an HRS MI Series heat exchanger lowers the product temperature further to ambient conditions.

Thermalization is a lower temperature alternative to pasteurization, and Bundaberg Brewed Drinks’ thermalizer uses two types of heat exchanger in different processes. The skid-mounted solution uses both MI and MR Series heat exchangers to raise the product to the required temperatures using both hot water and energy recovered from the subsequent cooling process. The cooling process, which also uses both MI and MR Series heat exchangers, returns the product to ambient temperature once thermalizer.

“Key considerations for this project were our ability to provide the required thermal performance in an efficient package, in a solution which could be delivered within the required timescale and budget,” says Ella Taghavi, sales engineering manager, HRS Heat Exchangers. “Much of our ability to provide such a solution is down to our corrugated tube design which increases heat transfer efficiency while reducing the size of the necessary heat transfer surface, allowing us to provide compact and efficient systems.”

As is common with such projects, the final design was the result of significant consultation between all three parties involved in the project, and once designed, the two systems were delivered in around 10 weeks. Commissioning was then carried out once the wider project overseen by M. E. Engineering was complete.