Purite RO technology enhances quality and cuts costs
for Meantime Brewing

An advanced reverse osmosis (RO) water purification system, developed and manufactured by Purite, is helping the innovative London brewers, Meantime Brewing Company, improve the quality and flavour of its exceptionally broad range of beet styles.  Just as importantly, the Purite water purification system is playing a key role in reducing maintenance and overall operating costs for Meantime Brewing, while also enabling the company to enhance levels of productivity.

Meantime Brewing is one of a growing number of micro-breweries in the UK, competing successfully at a local level with far larger, and long established, international and national brewers.  Based in Greenwich and established in 1999, the company originally concentrated on brewing and bottling beers for other suppliers.  In recent years, however, Meantime Brewing has gradually introduced its own unique and eclectic range of traditional bottle and brewery conditioned ales, wheat beers, lagers and flavoured beers; these include raspberry, chocolate and coffee beers.

Production Manager, Rob Lovatt, explains that, “Our beers rely on a combination of carefully blended ingredients to give them an exciting and sometimes unusual range of flavours.  In part, these are driven by a desire to use modern brewing technology to reach the full flavour potential that each beer has to offer, and in part by a deep routed interest in recreating the recipes and flavours of the past in a way that appeals to the consumers of today.  Key to this philosophy is the quality of the ingredients that we use and, in particular, the raw materials such as water, as this is key to ensuring that each beer we make is clearly differentiated in terms of flavour”.

Meantime Brewing draws its raw water direct from a relatively hard mains supply and, until recently, had been using a deionising system to treat the water prior to the brewing process.  Rob Lovatt adds, “Although we’d used this system for some time, it was relatively unreliable and we often had to wait days and sometimes longer for a service engineer to arrive on site.  As a result, it was impossible to guarantee a consistent level of machine availability or output water quality, which in turn impacted on our ability to produce the highest standard of beer.  Additionally, the system required regular chemical dosing, so it was costing us in terms of both unplanned downtime and the regular need to add consumables; the latter alone were adding around £8,000 to our annual maintenance costs.”

Meantime Brewing had watched the success with which other micro-breweries, including many overseas, had implemented reverse osmosis technology as a means of purifying raw water feeds.  Having researched the market they approached Purite, as a potential partner with the ability to supply a complete solution.  “We wanted a supplier that could design, build, install and then maintain the system on a long term basis”, explains Rob Lovatt.

The solution developed by Purite uses a proven Elite Plus reverse osmosis system, incorporating semi-permeable membranes through which pressurised feed water is passed to remove inorganic ions and dissolved organic contaminants.  This produces a permeate flow rate of approximately 1,000l/hour, with the ability to remove 98% of minerals and salts from the raw water supply and up to 99% of bacteria.  The system also incorporates activated carbon adsorption and softening to protect and maximise the operating life of the RO unit.

Purified water from the Purite RO system is used throughout the brewing process, being heated and added to the ground malt barley, or grist, and then again when the wort is drained and sparged, prior to the addition of hops and other ingredients.   The system operates on demand, being used to produce approximately 2,500l of water per day, enabling Meantime Brewing to maintain a consistent and high level of water purity, in terms of extremely low chemical and microbiological content.

Rob Lovatt concludes, “Since installing the Purite RO system we’ve virtually eliminated downtime due to problems with the purified water stream and have also seen a significant improvement in the quality and consistency of the finished products.  This is especially true of our range of lagers and finer ales with more delicate flavours, where we prefer to use purified water as it has far less impact on the taste.  Finally, our operating costs have fallen considerably as we are no longer use such a large volume of consumable items, while the system requires only minimal intervention and maintenance”.