Holland Malt, Eemshaven, Netherlands
Holland Malt is a successful, family-owned malting company that has been established for more than 100 years and now exports to over 50 countries worldwide. The produced malts cover all segments from craft and specialty breweries to distillers and global beer companies. “Quality” and “sustainability” are the company’s keywords, and its goal is to produce the highest quality malt in the most efficient way possible. As the price of malt is globally fixed, the company’s success and market position is a result of the quality of the malt and the long-term relationships with their customers and suppliers.
The company’s largest malting facility is located in Eemshaven in the north of the Netherlands. Here the barley is used to produce malt exclusively for pilsner beers, which is exported to customers across the world from Eemshaven’s deep-water sea-port.
The company has a strong relationship with Bühler dating back 17 years to the construction of the first Eemshaven plant, with the equipment proving so reliable that they once again chose Bühler as their partner when expanding the plant between 2016 and 2018.
One of the highlights of the new plant is the highly flexible RemoteCare agreement under which Bühler assists the customer with 24/7 support for the entire plant without the need for separate contracts, with a full system check to make sure everything is running smoothly and safely carried out once a year. This rapid-response solution is ideal for the Eemshaven plant, as there are no personnel onsite between 10pm and 6am.
“If something should happen, the system informs our service engineer by SMS about the issue,” says Malting Technologist Gert-Jan van Veen. “But even during the day something can happen that requires immediate action.” The security and peace of mind offered by RemoteCare then allows the company’s own software engineers to focus on other priorities. Often the people on the other end of the support line are the same Bühler Automation staff who worked onsite during the plant’s expansion, helping to further strengthen the relationship between the two companies.
The upgrade of the plant also saw it move from the WinCos R1 monitoring and control system to WinCos R2, a very different system that was new to the malting sector. Holland Malt wrote the functional design in partnership with Bühler, utilizing all of the improvements from R1. “For Bühler it was quite ‘out of the box’ processing and programming but we have a very good system running now,” says Gert-Jan van Veen.
“The combination of WinCos with all the other systems involved has the potential to make things complicated,” he points out. “Also, the malting process is a unique process, requiring special programming of the process and transport systems. Bühler had this knowledge already, and they have provided us a good and reliable system to work with.”
For us, the biggest advantages with Bühler are the knowledge of the processes and the flexibility to adjust things to our demands.
Gert-Jan van Veen,
Malting Technologist, Holland Malt
Gupfenstrasse 5
Uzwil
9240
Switzerland
