Part of Lion’s $70m refurbishment of the West End Brewery in South Australia included an upgrade to the cidery allowing the full scope of Lion’s cider portfolio to be produced including James Squire Orchid Crush, 5 Seeds and Kirin ciders.

Lion engaged mechanical installation experts TFG Group in conjunction with ME Engineering to install the new cider vessels and associated pipework.

4 x 18m fermenting tanks were decommissioned and removed from Perth’s Swan Brewery site for use in the new cidery. The sheer size of the vessels required extensive logistics planning for the removal, refurbishment and transportation to the new site. Each vessel was 150 thousand hectolitres, 18 metres tall by 4.2m in diameter and weighed 20 tonnes.

FERMENTING TANK UPGRADE

TFG’s Austline Fabrications division assisted TFG with the refurbishment of the 18m fermenting tanks in their state of the art workshop facilities in Perth.

FILTRATION SYSTEM

The state of the art cider filtration system included aseptic orbital welding and a flash pasteurizer to guarantee the quality of each cider brew.

The West End brewery upgrade ran for two years with 35 specialised welders from TFG onsite full time. To ensure the safety of their employees, sub-contractors and operations staff, TFG employed a dedicated onsite safety officer to oversee the project. As a result, 68,000 man hours were worked with zero safety incidents, MTIs or LTIs. This safety first approach was particularly pertinent given that the total shut down time for the installation was only seven weeks.