Plant integration increases plant efficiency

Ger­many, a tra­di­tion­al­ly strong beer-pro­duc­ing and ‑drink­ing coun­try, where select­ing a beer brand is often a very emo­tion­al choice – almost a form of region­al patri­o­tism – has numer­ous region­al brew­eries and micro­brew­eries that pro­duce spe­cial­i­ty beers. One of these region­al­ly very pop­u­lar brews is the Rothaus Pils Tan­nen­zäpfle, pro­duced by Rothaus Brew­ery, suc­cess­ful­ly on the mar­ket since 1956.

High-quality beer calling for continuous investments

Today, the Badis­che Staats­brauerei Rothaus AG (Baden State Brew­ery Rothaus) is recog­nised as a notable exam­ple of suc­cess; the rea­sons for that lie in the pre­mi­um qual­i­ty of its beer, the foun­da­tion of which are mod­ern brew­ing facil­i­ties. The bot­tling facil­i­ty at Rothaus has some of the most advanced tech­nolo­gies avail­able. This is how the brew­ery can sat­is­fy the high require­ments of san­i­ta­tion and guar­an­tee that cus­tomers will always be able to enjoy high-qual­i­ty beer.

Gebo Cermex, long-term partner in line engineering

As a case in point in their con­tin­u­ous invest­ment strat­e­gy, Rothaus decid­ed to work togeth­er with their long­stand­ing part­ner Gebo Cer­mex to solve the most recent chal­lenges the brew­ery was fac­ing. They want­ed to replace an age­ing bot­tling line – which in the medi­um term could no longer guar­an­tee the high hygiene and qual­i­ty stan­dards of the com­pa­ny. Addi­tion­al­ly, they were receiv­ing many return­able glass bot­tles from oth­er pro­duc­ers that they could not process accord­ing to the top pro­duc­tiv­i­ty con­trol rou­tines they have, as such poten­tial­ly com­pro­mis­ing the high effi­cien­cy tar­get of their new fill­ing line. The lat­ter sit­u­a­tion was prov­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly harsh in the sum­mer sea­son, when the infeed of bot­tles typ­i­cal­ly increas­es, while the num­ber of oper­a­tors at the brew­ery is reduced.
The Gebo Cer­mex team sup­plied the inte­gra­tion ser­vices for set­ting up a new sort­ing and a new bot­tling line. Work­ing close­ly with the cus­tomer, the com­pa­ny man­aged to ful­ly inte­grate 30 dif­fer­ent machines from more than a dozen dif­fer­ent sup­pli­ers, cre­at­ing a new line that can sort an impres­sive 3,200 crates per hour and bot­tle up to 76,800 bph. Addi­tion­al­ly, Gebo Cer­mex pro­vid­ed the crown feed­ers and the con­vey­ing com­po­nents, includ­ing pal­lets man­age­ment with­in the brewery.

Maximum uptime regardless of irregular bottles

The Gebo Cer­mex solu­tion is able to deliv­er reli­a­bil­i­ty and effi­cien­cy near­ly regard­less of the per­cent­age of irreg­u­lar return­able bot­tles. This means the crates can con­tain, on aver­age, 40% and in peak times up to 80% of bot­tles from oth­er pro­duc­ers with­out caus­ing issues. In addi­tion, the sort­ing line can run at 85% effi­cien­cy in twelve dif­fer­ent modes to sort bot­tles and crates, fill used or new crates – with used or new bot­tles – and cre­ate stocks of emp­ty crates. All of that con­tributes to a per­for­mance increase of the bot­tling lines, with the one installed most recent­ly work­ing at 90% efficiency.