LOO-BLAH-NAH, Slovenia / 2021

About the Company

This craft brewery in Slovenia’s capital makes unique beers from carefully selected natural ingredients. With a combination of passion, sincerity and respect for tradition, they are making beer into a new, different and fresh product. LOO-BLAH-NAH is a beer that is different, fresh and drinkable, and above all mostly made from home-grown ingredients. In order to create various flavours, the LOO-BLAH-NAH brewery team uses fifteen types of malt and five different yeasts. One of them is their very own yeast, which they use primarily for English types of beer. Their work and efforts have been recognised in the form of many international and Slovenian prizes.

Their Challenge

The brewery’s growth has enlarged their selection of beers and the quantities that have to be produced. The need thus arose for an automatic filling line, which would establish a system without loss of quality, and for a flexible filling unit allowing rapid changes between different sorts of beer, as well as flexibility in packaging, as the market demands brewers provide beer in bottles and cans. It was not possible to set up of two separate filling lines, so only a compact filling line uniting all functions could be considered.

In the past the bottles were filled using a manual isobaric filler, with which it was hard to keep up with orders, while for canning they used the services of external providers. In order to make the canning process more economical they had to can large quantities, but this posed a major challenge in planning stocks and sales due to the large selection of different beers. The limited capacities of fermentation tanks was another problem they faced, together with a lack of room due to the large number of filled cans. The beers produced by these Ljubljana brewers are not pasteurised, so another challenge they had to address was a drop in quality when they are stored.

Our Solution

They chose Sraml’s automated filling line for bottles and cans, which uses the technology of an isobaric filler, enabling the rapid exchange of bottles and cans without the need to empty or clean the filler. All that needs to be done to change the system is replace the filling tubes and centering bells, which can be done without any tools as everything operates using a “click” system. This simple and safe system for changing the filling technology is at the same time a solution that protects the product against oxidation. The brewers have noticed that with the new filling line oxygen pick-up is much lower than before. In the final phase the bottle capping machine must also be adjusted – simply by rotating the turret and fitting a guide for the caps.

“Making the change from bottles to cans and vice versa currently takes 30 minutes, because we are not technicians but brewers. But we expect to quickly master the routine and halve the time, making it 15 minutes.” Domen Srebot, chief brewer at LOO-BLAH-NAH.

An intuitive user interface, which enables control over the whole filling procedure via a touchscreen, is used to determine the type of beer and choose the packaging or other parameters. The system enables recipes to be stored and the pressure in the filler to be adjusted continuously and individually, depending on the recipe. Filling takes place automatically without the need for any interventions – brewers would say it runs “without fiddling with valves” or guessing which parameters were used during the last filling.

Even cleaning the filler on the line is straightforward. The system is optimised for cleaning and has an integrated CIP system on the filler which enables fast, simple and automatic cleaning. All that has to be done is attach the CIP unit, fit the blank bottles and start the programme. The filling line is also equipped with an advanced system of sensors which monitors the weight of the outgoing product. Closure is followed by weighing and a comparison of values with the set parameters. Non-compliant products are removed automatically.

Key benefits

Thanks to the precision of isobaric filling and the beneficent process of packaging deaeration by means of vacuum/CO₂ injection, the beer remains fresh in its packaging for longer. Sraml’s automated filling line is also helping these Ljubljana brewers save large amounts of time. In the past they needed 48 hours to empty the fermenter (2,000 l) but now 6 hours is enough. They can go very quickly from filling cans to filling bottles, and vice versa. What currently takes them 30 minutes they will soon – with a little practice – be able to do in less than 15. And finally, what makes Slovenian beer truly Slovenian? Not just Slovenian ingredients, but also knowledge and technology of Slovenian origin.

“In addition to the truly outstanding filling machine we are also very satisfied with the SRAML team’s support. They are always prepared to help and find solutions to optimise our work.”

Domen Srebot, chief brewer at LOO-BLAH-NAH