Waste Not, Want Not

Maximising the yield from a beer barrel is something every pint drinker can identify with.

When leading beer stillage manufacturer Kayel Engineering needed a gas spring with specific characteristics for its latest product design, no surprise that it should turn to the UK's market leader, Industrial Gas Springs to fit the bill.

Conditioning a barrel of beer is not simply a matter of laying it on its side in a cellar to allow the sediment to settle in the belly of the cask.

That's the easy part.

To do it properly and get the best yield requires a lot more skill.

Ideally, once a few pints have been drawn off, the barrel should be tilted - gently - so that the sediment, or ullage, occupies the smallest volume at the bottom of the cask.

Get it right and there may be as little as one or two pints lost in ullage.

Get it wrong, or forget to tilt the cask after the initial quantity has been removed, and that figure can easily grow to around 10 pints from a 9 gallon barrel.

And don't think that pre-tilting the barrel is the answer, as this will only brings the cask's air vent below the level of the liquid, resulting in further wastage! Cue the self-tilting beer stillage; a deceptively simple device, yet one with very specific design criteria.

Kayel Engineering is the country's leading manufacturer.

The company has been based at Horsham in West Sussex for almost 40 years and supplies pub chains, free houses, and both national and regional breweries with a wide range of beer storage and dispensing equipment.

The company's latest self-tilting stillages represent the fruits of more than 10 years development and refinement.

Previously, its designs consisted of a cradle, pivoted to the unit's base and located by a simple steel coil spring.

The principle was simple.

A full cask was laid on the frame, completely compressing the spring.

As beer was drawn off, the spring slowly expanded to produce the required tilting action.

"Although these became standard equipment for many breweries during the 1990s, both for cellar and back-bar applications, they did have one drawback," says Kayel's Technical Director, Mike Laker.

"The stillages had no natural damping, so if they were inadvertently knocked by a member of staff, they would gently oscillate; disturbing the sediment in the cask.

"To overcome this problem, we needed to retain the effect of the coil spring, but complement it with extremely high damping.

This would also ensure that the stillage provided an almost imperceptible tilting action as the barrel emptied.

In addition, we were keen to create a universal design that would be suitable for all cask sizes from 9 to 22 gallons.

Following a series of discussions with Industrial Gas Springs (IGS), the design criteria for a suitable gas spring to meet Kayel's requirements were agreed.

"An important consideration was also the unit's operating environment," continues Mr Laker.

"The average British pub cellar is cold and damp.

It may be ideal for conditioning beer, but hardly the best conditions for the operation of our stillages.

And when you add in the odd spill of beer and the subsequent hosing down of equipment, the humble beer cellar can quickly become an aggressive operating environment for most kinds of mechanical equipment," he adds.

To meet these requirements, IGS recommended a type GS 2576-1 gas spring, complete with stainless steel operating rod to ensure maximum corrosion resistance.

The gas spring has a self-lubricating action.

But for added protection, Kayel has incorporated a moulded bellows-shaped sleeve into the design to accommodate the gas spring's stroke.

In operation, the stillage will start to tilt after approximately a gallon has been drawn off a 9 gallon barrel, while an equivalent 18 gallon cask will be half empty before it begins to move.

And the result? Well, in a series of trials, the latest Kayel tilting stillage was evaluated against its principal competitor.

It consistently achieved a 99.5% yield, and was subsequently selected as the unit of choice for a leading national drinks chain.

Mr Laker is quick to acknowledge the part played by the applications engineering team at IGS in specifying and developing an appropriate unit for his application.

"We currently supply around 4000 automatic tilting stillages to the trade every year, making them the de facto standard within the industry," he notes.

"And with customers typically achieving a payback on each unit in around three months, that means a lot of previously wasted beer is now being saved - something we can all drink to!" About Industrial Gas Springs Ltd Based at Mitcham, Surrey, IGS has established a 20 year track record as the UK's leading supplier of industrial gas springs.

The company's vast product range is applied across the widest spectrum of manufacturing industry and its in-house design, applications engineering and manufacturing capabilities are certified to ISO 9001:2000 quality standards.

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