A Spotlight on The Great Yorkshire Brewery And Romfil Machinery

Last month, an article created by a member of the Vitkit team, Kieran, featured in the November edition of the Brewers Journal. The article focuses on how Romfil beer brewing equipment, provided by Vitikit Limited, is being used to produce high-quality beers by the Great Yorkshire Brewery. We hope you enjoy the read and learn a little bit more about the capabilities of Romfil brewing equipment and, in particular, their crossflow filter technology.

Beer Brewing Equipment from Romfil

Before we shine a spotlight on the Great Yorkshire Brewery and how they are using Romfil beer brewing equipment to such effect, let’s take a little look at the equipment itself. We provide several types of Romfil filter and, following some trails and consultation, the Great Yorkshire Brewery decided on the XF4- B Beer Membrane Filter, which is semi-automatic up to 4,000l/hr. Since acquiring this advanced piece of brewing equipment from Vitikit, the brewery has enjoyed increased filtration capacity, and with no consumable bill and a degree of automation.

A Background to the Great Yorkshire Brewery

The Great Yorkshire Brewery, originally Crompton Brewery, was a craft brewer before the name existed. A pioneer in microbrewery produced cask ale and still brewing their own beers, they have gained a reputation as a trusted contract brewer and packer for many UK craft brewers. Now, they have a new toy, in the form of the piece of beer brewing equipment known as the Romfil Crossflow filter.

Back in 1984, five years before the now revoked Beer Orders, which was designed to break the monopoly of the big Breweries and landlords, Phil Lee, at Crompton Brewery started to brew cask beer in the cellar of the New Inn in North Yorkshire. 

The original brewhouse was 5 BBL, and its first beer was a Cask Ale called “Two Pints”. Soon they upgraded to a 10 BBl brewhouse, and eventually to a 2 vessel, infusion type 30 BBL brewhouse. The building that housed the 10 BBL Brewhouse now houses Kegging and Bottling equipment and the 30 BBL brewing and fermentation equipment has a purpose-made building.

Meeting the Great Yorkshire Brewery Team

Head brewer Alex Noblett has been there for four years and takes responsibility for brewing Great Yorkshires core beers. On top of this, he takes charge of scheduling in and producing contract brews for UK craft brewers who are either at capacity, or cuckoo brewing without kit of their own. Alex has a good vantage point and has seen the craft brewing industry trends change slightly, particularly towards low and no alcohol beers – which has been taking up more and more of their contract brewing capacity, and accounts for a majority of new enquiries.

Nathan, the packaging manager, is responsible for processing beer into bottle, cask and keg and more recently can, through variable filtration parameters. He used to do so with an 80 plate sheet filter from V- Brew. The Plate filter replaced an earth filter, which was sold to a Vineyard in Devon in 2014, after the brewing team had decided that it was messy, expensive and difficult to train new operatives to use.

A Revolutionary Filtration System Recognised 

As mentioned earlier, Great Yorkshire bought a Romfil X Flow this year, which revolutionised filtration. Speaking of the impact this piece of beer brewing equipment has had, Alex commented: “The auto discharge on the x flow allows us to match the performance of the plate filter in HL/hr but with the semi-automation (so we can run overnight & during the day) massively decreases the labour intensity of the filtering and means there are no consumables ie filter sheets. Set up and clean down times are improved also.”

Crossflow filtration works like a bypass – with beer being gently recirculated through the porous membranes and back to the pump inlet. The “clean” filtrate passes the membrane due to a pressure difference, and the beer in the system gets more and more turbid.

Comparing Beer and Wine Filtration

In the wine making equipment industry, it’s common to program a ‘discharge’ cycle. This empties the system of the wine with accumulating turbidity and starts filtration with fresh wine – the discharged wine is sent to a small process tank for filtration later on. This greatly increases the performance of the filter. 

With beer filtration, to perform a ‘discharge’, a complicated gas management system is usually needed to process beer under pressure. But in the UK, it’s more common to process beer under atmospheric pressure and the Romfil was able to run with discharge and without the gas management system. A cheaper endeavour! Golden Ales and Lagers run at 30HL per hour plus, and around 20HL for very heavily dry hopped beers.

Great Yorkshire’s busy contract brewing and packing business means that a spare tank for racking is rarely available and so the crossflow was expected to cope with beer taken from the partial take of an unracked tank, which did mean some extra settling time was required for the heavily dry hopped beers.

Romfil’s lees filter, designed to recover expensive wine from yeast slurry, is currently being tested in the recovery of IPA from hop slurry. An automated sieve manifold is also available to cope with very heavily hopped beers.

Pores & ‘Police’ Filters

It’s an odd quirk of crossflow filtration that the smaller the pore (typically .2 Micron), the more efficient the filtration. This is because the product moves tangentially, and the larger pores present a rougher surface and become blocked more quickly than the smooth surface of smaller pores. The Beer Crossflow has been developed to work with larger pores (0.6 Micron Nominal) and this is to maintain the levels of foam positive proteins in the beer.

0.6 Micron is not regarded as sterile, and if a sterile product is required, an absolute ‘police’ filter cartridge should be fitted prior to the packing line. This police filter will have a very long life and possibly will be smaller than usually used because, when tested under the microscope, it was not possible to detect any yeast cells in beer post crossflow. 

Brewery Visits & Brewing Equipment Demonstrations

Great Yorkshire always welcome visitors, whether it’s to speak about contract brewing or packing, or just to take a look at their new toy. Likewise, at Vitikit, we always welcome conversations about any of the equipment that we provide and are happy to arrange a time to supply you with the information needed, before deciding to invest in a type of machinery. Contact us today to learn more about Romfil crossflow technology and to discuss our brewing equipment and microbrewery equipment in detail.