Concentrating beer
Last month, Alfa Laval Group (Lund, Sweden; www.alfalaval.com) acquired Sandymount (Woburn, Mass.), a beverage-technology company with a patented membrane technology for concentrating beer. The technology, in combination with Alfa Laval’s product range, will enable beer producers to deliver high-quality beer in concentrated form. The solution addresses the transportation inefficiencies in beer supply where beer remains one of the few water-laden products distributed as “mostly water” from producer to consumer, says Alfa Laval. The newly acquired company, with its founder and employees, will be integrated into the business unit Food Systems in the Food & Water Division.
Sandymount’s patented reverse-osmosis (RO) membrane technology, tradenamed Revos, is a two-pass process for concentrating liquids containing small, neutrally charged molecules (like ethanol and aromatics). This means that any alcohol or aroma that does escape through the membranes in a first step of filtration is collected, put through a second pass and returned back to the first pass. In this way, the system as a whole is capable of retaining substantially all aromas and alcohol. Two-pass processes have been used for many years in seawater and industrial applications involving salts. Revos patents cover multi-pass or multi-step designs involving alcohols and aromas instead. Revos is a low-temperature, ultra-high pressure process, operating at over 120 bars (over 1,700 psi).