How Carlsberg keeps 10,000 valves in play

Stand in Carlsberg’s Fredericia brewery, and you can see how seriously the team takes reliability. Lines run through dense forests of valves, rows of control tops blink quietly above, and maintenance teams move with a practised rhythm. In this Carlsberg plant, keeping 10,000 valves in shape is not a one-off project – it is a daily discipline.

Water factor of 2 by 2030

At the outset, the benchmark is unambiguous: With its ZERO Water Waste program, Carlsberg targets by 2030 an industry-leading global water factor of 1 hectoliter of finished product to every 2 hectoliters (hl/hl) of water, while maintaining its 1.7 hl/hl target for breweries in areas of high water risk. At these high water-risk breweries, Carlsberg aims to replenish 100% of the water consumed.

These targets aren’t achieved in one leap but by thousands of small, smart decisions in process design, cleaning, diagnostics and maintenance. Here, hygienic valves matter because they shape how often lines are cleaned, how reliably they separate products and how safely technicians work. And that’s where hygienic valve design – including GEA's VARIVENT platform – becomes critical for predictable, validated cleaning.

From consolidation to long-life reuse

The partnership between Carlsberg and GEA spans decades but is marked by a major strategic decision. In 2008, Carlsberg consolidated two Danish sites into one location at Fredericia and moved major equipment, including entire valve blocks, from Copenhagen. The condition of the valves was so good that they could be repurposed, recommissioned, and returned to production, which proves their underlying mechanical integrity. Those valves have been running in Fredericia for another 17 years and counting.

Moving equipment is one thing, operating at scale is another. The Fredericia brewery produces approximately 3 million hectoliters of beer and 3 million hectoliters of soft drinks a year. “Across the Fredericia site, we run around 10,000 valves, mainly butterfly valves and seat valves,” explains Kasper Rasmussen, Business Development Manager at Carlsberg in Fredericia. “About a quarter of all our valves come from GEA. We use mostly the D-type valve, both with seat flush and with seat lifting. In our highly-hygiene areas, like our yeast-handling areas, we often use the R-type valve.”

What ‘good’ looks like on the shop floor

When technicians are asked what they value in GEA VARIVENT, their answers are consistent: robustness, clarity, safety. Kasper confirms: “GEA VARIVENT valves are easy to understand. When we do maintenance on it, it’s easy for the technicians to understand how the valve works, and, thereby, also safe for the technicians to work with it.”

But longevity isn’t accidental. It’s designed in and maintained with discipline. With his background as a mechanical engineer, Kasper knows what ‘good’ looks like on the shop floor: “I recognize a good piece of machinery when I see it. For me, a good piece of machinery is a reliable piece of machinery that can do the job it was intended for, every time in the same way.”

Lifespan thinking in practice

That perspective underpins how Carlsberg uses the GEA VARIVENT line. The brewery keeps the welded housings and wetted parts in place, then retrofits actuators and control tops on site. “It’s a straightforward way to modernize diagnostics and control without cutting into pipework or rebuilding a matrix,” Kasper says. “This lifecycle approach reduces downtime, avoids unnecessary steel and accelerates commissioning. When you’re changing hundreds and hundreds of valves at a time, that difference multiplies into shorter outages and lower lifetime cost.” Moreover, he values the replacement program from GEA that fits well with Carlsberg’s strategy of making a lifetime extension on existing equipment.

Fredericia’s maintenance cadence reflects the site’s scale: Technicians work in defined windows to service hundreds of valves within a few days. The support of GEA’s service team consists of providing staff and know-how to deliver within the window, which simplifies planning and execution.

Seasonality adds a further constraint. High season typically runs from May to September, so larger projects land earlier in the year to protect capacity. One recent upgrade, which involved replacing legacy ball valves in fermentation with hygienic seat and mixproof solutions, ran from February to early May, fitting exactly into this logic.

More than ‘just valves’: a platform to build on

For Kasper, GEA VARIVENT isn’t only about product valves. For many years, it’s also been their standard housing for instruments and sample valves. “When we build a system, we often just put in GEA VARIVENT housing,” he says. “If we need them at a later point, for measurements or sampling, for instance, we have the flexibility to just ship down the line and put in the component that we need for whatever purpose. It’s the most hygienic way to introduce instruments into the process.” That detail matters to operators and auditors alike: clean interfaces reduce risk, simplify documentation and support consistent results.

On the sustainability side, the Fredericia brewery added another lever. Designed as a Total Water Management (TWM) plant, it recycles 90% of its process water, treating industrial wastewater to potable quality and routing it back for cleaning purposes. In practice, that means fewer fresh-water draws for clean-in-place (CIP) and auxiliary tasks, an engineering choice aligned with the brewery’s water ambitions and enabled by hygienic equipment that supports predictable, validated cleaning.

From one big move to many small steps

If the 2008 move was the headline project, the day-to-day story is a steady flow of smaller, well-timed interventions. “We make each other better,” says Anna-Birthe Løhde from GEA Valves and Pumps Service, Denmark. “Our collaboration is built on transparency and a shared understanding of when a project needs attention or when an incremental fix will do.”

Kasper especially appreciates this practical, down-to-earth approach of the partnership: documentation that sticks, availability of spare parts and a service planning that integrates with Carlsberg’s own maintenance systems. “GEA is always in the scope because they are reliable. When the team needed to clean up historical component records, GEA provided spare-parts lists and expected runtimes between services, ready to drop into Carlsberg’s maintenance programs.”

A shared definition of ‘better’

Partnerships are only as strong as their shared definitions. For Carlsberg and GEA, “better” means documented hygiene, predictable cleaning, clear diagnostics and safe maintenance. The aim isn’t perfection in one area, it’s repeatability across lines, shifts and years. This also explains why pairing long-lived mechanics with modern control and communication makes sense. Or as Anna-Birthe nicely sums it up: “Improve what should evolve and retain what has proved itself in service.”

When asked to describe GEA VARIVENT in one word, Kasper lands on its very spirit: “If you’ve made a product 50 years ago and only had to change minor things in how you control it, then you really had a strong design from the beginning.”