Siebel Institute of Technology Update

Upgrade to our pilot brewery, amazing sponsorship partners

It’s not often that you move a [brewing] school and in addition find industry partners willing to add their expertise, innovation and good will. For everyone’s benefit, our existing 1bbl pilot brewery was relocated from Kendall College to our new Green Street campus and we took the lead to share the exciting news and opportunity with selected suppliers, offering them an opportunity to showcase their equipment and innovations. The generosity of our sponsors has allowed Siebel to expand our R+D capability, consulting and training capacity and provides students with ’hands on’ experience of new technologies.

A significant donation from Micro Matic, the leading global supplier of dispense equipment, has furnished our Bierstube with all new state of the art dispense equipment, including dispense towers, under counter coolers, sinks, glycol chiller, gas/beer manifolds, custom beer python and high temperature glass washer for our Biersommelier classes and draught beer training. This support from Micro Matic has allowed us to turn our Bierstube into a state of the art training room and sensory facility.

Paul Mueller Company topped up the draught system, donating two horizontal multipurpose dispense tanks that we will use with a food grade liner for dispensing under compressed air rather than CO2.

Andritz, Vienna has donated a mash filter [some call it mash press] that allows us to brew with alternative carbohydrate sources, such as sorghum, millet or any other raw material that would struggle in a classic lauter tun. With this innovative technology, future graduates can not only become more familiar with the mash filtration process as such, but also have the opportunity to explore an alternative process for wort extraction in the brewing process.

The next ace is our can filler! Wild Goose, a Colorado outfit from Louisville, catering to the craft beer sector for more than a decade, and has built more than 1000 canners, has donated their latest innovation to the Siebel Institute: The Gosling. It will allow us to fill up to 12 cans per minute and is perfect for trials and market focus groups or for neighborhood brewers wanting to drop by with a keg of beer and leave with trays of cans. We are the first school in North America with such a can filler and seamer.

Malthandling LLC from Chicago have contributed a brand new malt mill, George Fischer gifted all high end glycol fittings, and Pro Refrigeration provided a 50 % discount on the new glycol unit that had to be craned in through the roof.

We are still gathering more laboratory equipment from Anton Paar and Pentair, stay tuned. All sponsors have joined Siebel as strategic education partners in a two way relationship. We are convinced that our Siebel brand will benefit from suppliers engaging with us and vice versa. The key accounts of our partners will have the opportunity to test our specialized lectures and, hopefully, more of their customers will turn into Siebel students. That’s what we call a win – win!

Christian von der Heide – President & CEO of Siebel Institute of Technology