GEA Mast-Jägermeister plant goes into production in Germany
The 1,200m² sits next to its existing North Production plant, which stores base ingredients for blending, and allows for product changeovers between classic Jägermeister liqueur and other spirits.
Quick changeovers
Dr. Berndt Finke, head of production and raw goods management, Mast-Jägermeister, said the GEA 7-component in-line blending system means it can be flexible to meet demands for different products and quickly make changeovers.
“The South Production plant is where the Jägermeister base ingredients are enriched with pure water, alcohol, caramel and liquid sugar,” he said.
“In future, Jägermeister will be able to activate two additional components for the production of other products.”
According to Uwe Kolkmann, project manager, GEA, the blending system has a capacity of 30,000 liters per hour which equates to around 42,000 0.7-liter bottles.
It received the order for the entire process technology in June 2016 and installed it last year.
He said the main plant still uses a conventional blending pump which is dosed by volume, but the South Production plant uses GEA’s mass flow meters. This is where the formulas are stored in an integrated database and the quantities are calculated using a specified master formula and then corrected if they differ from the specifications in the master formula.
Aroma carry-over
Kolkmann added because Jägermeister is blending a large number of ingredients the base ingredients have to be emptied with minimal loss into the respective tank and avoid aroma carry-over.
“Even the smallest amounts of aromatic herbs and spices could spoil a whole following batch,” he said.
“We clean the pipelines with hot ultra-pure water when changing the product, which in turn has to be completely removed from the pipeline to exclude product dilutions with water. To do this, we use pigging technology.
“We only use nitrogen as a propellant for pigging alcoholic media. The system could explode with compressed air.”
