New malt handling installation fitted into historic brewery Halve Maan !

Context

Brewery De Halve Maan is a traditional family brewery established in 1564 in the medieval city of Bruges. The brewery produces Straffe Hendrik (one of the few quadruple fermentation beers) and Brugse Zot which the real town beer of Bruges. De Halve Maan is a true touristical attraction.

Through the years, the brewery has added several dining rooms, a cafeteria and a museum to its premises and it organises guided tours of the brewery as well, but its core business remains brewing the two famous & delicious beers mentioned above, for sale in Belgium of course, but also worldwide through a specific distribution channel.
The brewery came first in contact with Spiromatic back in 2012 because it needed to completely renew its very important dry material handling process (from malt reception to feeding to a wet roller mill).

Challenge

The previous installation was labourintensive, poorly isolated to heat and sound, far from being automated and struggling to output the hectolitres the company wanted to achieve.

Spiromatic was consulted for this ambitious project and after many engineering hours of design work and creative thinking came up with a solution that was immediately adopted by the Halve Maan.

Spiromatic’s proposal allowed for preserving the historical brew house attic (classified by the city of Bruges) while fitting it with the latest technologies and making efficient use of the small space available.

Solution

Spiromatic supplied a turn-key project from the street inlet of raw malt all the way to accurate dosing of malt in the customer’s brewing process.The malt is vacuum-conveyed from the street in to the attic of the brewhouse where it is distributed in five different indoor silos.

From there the materials are conveyed by fexible spiral conveyors to a weighing hopper via a security magnet and a destoner before being fed in to the wet roller mill in the brew house. Frederik Verstringe is Halve Maan’s Master Brewer:

“The Engineering team of Spiromatic visited the site many times during the design phase to take accurate measurements and have a good understanding of the unique constraints. Through constant exchange on process details, an atmosphere of trust was quickly established and Spiromatic demonstrated all their professional rigor and engineering capabilities on paper before they were awarded the realisation of this project”.

Results

By clearly integrating the solution in the existing brew house, Spiromatic respected one of the most important constraint:

The quality and capability of the system it delivered will allow the brewery Halve Maan to continue meeting the ever growing demand for their great products in the foreseeable future.