Wells and Young's Brewery

For Wells and Young’s Brewing Company Ltd, one of the UK’s leading brewers of speciality beers, the reliability of its process equipment is critical to the 24 hour, seven-day-a-week operation at its Bedford plant.

The company has invested in a Reavellife maintenance contract from CompAir’s specialist High Pressure Division, to ensure the continuous availability of its two 5236 air compressors used for Carbon Dioxide reclamation. This means that the brewery can reprocess the maximum amount of CO2 from the fermentation process and reuse it for top pressure, helping to save up to £3000 on the cost of purchasing the 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide required each week.

Prior to taking out the service agreement, the brewery was using its on-site engineers to carry out minor repairs to the compressors. However, these engineers did not have the same specialist knowledge, technical support backup and access to genuine spare parts as CompAir technicians, meaning that the company would sometimes have to place an emergency call with the manufacturer to rectify the fault.

Driven by the merger of the brewing operations of Young’s and Charles Wells and the subsequent need to increase production on the site, the company began looking at ways of minimising downtime to help improve efficiency and reduce cost. Graham Walker, Engineering Services Administrator explains: “It became clear that the longer the compressors were out of operation, the higher our costs became as we would have to buy in the CO2 that we were unable to reclaim and store through compression.

Wells and Young's Brewery 2

“At £100 a tonne, costs could escalate rapidly, so we decided to invest in a preventative maintenance contract to ensure peak performance and extend the life of these two vital pieces of equipment.

“It was soon apparent that we had made the right decision as on our first 6-monthly check, the CompAir technician discovered a fault on one of the valves. As he carries a range of common spare parts with him, he was able to change the faulty valve straight away, avoiding equipment downtime and the potential for more serious damage to occur to the compressor.”

The preventative maintenance contract includes two Reavellife service visits per year in which the CompAir engineer undertakes a variety of performance checks, and the replacement of any consumable items. This incorporates a full inspection of all components and assemblies, checks on oil levels and filter quality and a full function test.

The brewery receives a report of the condition of the machines together with a quotation for any essential repair work required. Next-day priority delivery of breakdown parts is assured, as CompAir Reavell guarantees it can fulfil 85% of all parts orders from stock.

CompAir will also aim to respond to any emergency call out within 24 hours, to minimise equipment downtime.

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