October 23, 2014 — Griffin Claw Brewing Company visited various breweries and reviewed the equipment used for brewing some of the best beer in the world, before returning home to Birmingham, Michigan to set up their brewing process. When reviewing the equipment, owner Norm LePage and brewmaster Dan Rogers, realized that a conveyor system would aid in the efficiency of removing the spent grain.
When Griffin Claw was reviewing equipment “we were looking at a large mash filter and we saw that underneath it they had an auger system, a kind of a screw auger, and I thought wow that is really an efficient way to move the spent grain” explained Rogers. Spent grain is the leftover malt and adjuncts after the mash has extracted most of the sugars, proteins and nutrients in the beer making process.
Spent grain can constitute as much as 85 percent of a brewery’s total by-product. Getting the spent grain out of the way is a bottle neck in the production of beer and needs to be removed before the next batch of beer can be started. “When we started putting the equipment in here, we decided that we needed a system like that” said LePage, and would need an easy to clean conveyor as part of the process for removing the spent grain.
Griffin Claw got in touch with Dynamic Conveyor, the manufacturer of the DynaClean food processing conveyor, located in Muskegon, Michigan. The company visited Griffin Claw to look at their equipment, which included the screw auger and mash filter. Griffin Claw realized that the conveyor system would have to be custom made because they are the first in the United States to have this large size of a mash filter.
Before getting the conveyor system, Griffin Claw was using dump tanks and having to wheel them out, individually by hand, and then having a fork-truck lift them up and dump the waste into hoppers for pick up by local farmers. Like many other breweries, Griffin Claw gives back the bulk of their spent grain to their agricultural community – from “foam-to-farm” so to speak.
Since installing the DynaClean food processing conveyor, the spent grain is conveyed directly into the totes and taken outside so the farmers can pick it up. “That is an amazing thing and it works beautifully for us”, says LePage.
At the end of every week, Griffin Claw completely breaks down their DynaClean conveyor, thoroughly cleans it, and puts it back together so that it is ready for the next week. “It has really saved us a lot of time and money. We are able to do four batches per day right now, where before we were only able to get out three, and now we are looking to do six batches a day” explains Rogers, “it’s working that well. We are very, very happy with it.”
To watch the easy to clean conveyor video or to learn more about the DynaClean conveyor system visit the website at www.DynamicConveyor.com or call 1.800.640.6850.