WHAT COSTS £2.5MILLION, HAS SOLAR PANELS AND GOES AT 300 FIRKINS AN HOUR?

Cornish family firm St Austell Brewery are ploughing £2.5m into a new eco-friendly ’300 firkins per hour’ cask racking hall. 



Head brewer Roger Ryman told The Brewers Guardian this week: “At the moment, our problem is we can brew it quicker than we can rack it.

“So we fairly quickly grind to a halt.”



”The new building will be fitted with a Microdat racking line, increasing St Austell’s packaging capabilities from 120 firkins to 300 firkins an hour and resolving packaging bottlenecks.



“We’re also going for a lot more mechanical handling within the operation, like automatic palletising and depalletising and automatic keystone removal.”

The plant should be built by June, and will also include a large cold storage area.”

Much of St Austell’s beer is currently stored in the brewery’s century-old cellars. 

The new building’s going to be energy self-sufficient, using solar panels, heat recovery and low-energy lighting.



St Austell own a growing chain of local pubs and have invested millions of pounds in recent years to update their Victorian brewhouse.

Last year the firm spent £550,000 on equipment including a malt mill, grist case, mash tun and hop back.

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Posted by admin on February 27, 2012. Filed under NEWS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry