The Modern Cask Elevator & Lowerator

In traditional breweries cask Elevators, Delevator or Lowerator were common place particularly in tower breweries with the cask cellars spread over several floors since there was a need to move casks from level to level etc.

Traditional Elevators were slow, usually very large and were constructed from very large sprockets and chains, often resembling a mineshaft lift.

As part of the Otter Brewery development Microdat as been ask to supply a Lowerator and Elevator for the new packaging plant and warehouse which is located in a very modern eco-friendly building on two floors.

The dirty casks are washed on the upper floor where the dray lorries unload and then the clean casks drop to the lower floor via the new Lowerator which is located after the new Microdat Mini 3 cask washer (rated at 120 casks per hour)

The new Lowerator is a very modern device constructed in stainless steel with steel reinforced polyurethane toothed belts used for driving and lifting the load. Unlike the old traditional Elevators and Lowerator that were slow continuous running devices the new machine is a rapid lift system with a single carriage.

The modern drive technology enables the cask to be moved rapidly from the upper to lower floor in around 4 seconds but with a very smooth action thus the cask will accelerate and decelerate rapidly from the collection point to the roll off point yet it will gently place the cask on the roll off (knock off) rails. The empty carriage will then return even faster to collect the next cask thus the new single lift Lowerator ie easily capable of handling 200 casks per hour between two floors with 4m separation.

The washed cask will then be filled and stored in the lower floor (cellar) which is built partially into the hill side to use natural ground cooling to condition the beer in the cellar.

Once the beer is conditioned it will then be elevated from the cellar to the upper floor loading bay via a new full cask Elevator.

This device is again a new rapid operation single carriage lift but this time each lift will hold two 18 gallon casks to deliver over 200 casks per hour to the loading bay.

The construction of the new twin cask Elevator is very similar to the Lowerator and uses identical toothed belts driven via a larger modern digitally controlled drive unit.

The new Lowerator and Elevator are a modular design and can be used for various applications for both automated operation like the Otter brewery applications or the units can be installed in an existing brick shaft to produce a very economical goods-drum lift with manual loading and off loading etc.