Analyzing Oxygen: Final Product Quality Control In Beer Bottling

The hop processing company of Hopfenveredlung St. Johann is processing around 25.000 metric tons of hops per year to pellets. At their production site in St. Johann, Hallertau, Germany, they run a state of the art pilot brewery. One of the key functions of the pilot brewery is to run trials on a variety of brewing functions, including raw product (hops and hop-products) and technology (including bottling, brewing and analytical instrumentation), as well as product development. These trials are done for the shareholders Barth Haas Group and HVG and other breweries or suppliers on a contract basis.

Recently, the facility had the opportunity to test a KRONES semi-automatic bottling device. This was done to ensure that the equipment on hand would meet the reproducibility standards set by the pilot brewery. To test the instrument, the brewery set up an Orbisphere 6110 Total Package Analyzer. During this test, the facilitator pulled every 15th bottle from the line, resulting in 750 bottles being tested over a period of two days.