**1. History of continuous beer production**

The wish to feel good is the wish to feel good continuously. Transferring this to the consumption of beer may lead to the wish to produce beer continuously (**Table 1**).

During the last 100 years, more and more continuous steps have been integrated into the brewing process. Lots of energy can be saved during malting and wort boiling. Filling of the beer needs lots of expensive and labour-intensive machines, which work efficiently, if pursued in a continuous manner.

Brewing processes are mainly mixing and clarification processes. During malting, mashing, wort boiling and fermentation, mixing can easily be performed in a continuous manner. Clarification and separation processes like lautering, wort clarification, yeast settling and maturation are traditionally performed by gravity and settling in a batch process. For the continuous process, these have to be altered into separation processes by decanters, centrifuges and crossflow filtrations. The intersection between a batch process and a continuous process needs buffer vats, tanks before and after the continuous process. Buffers are capacities that cost money, space and energy, have to be cleaned and maintained and limit the advantages of a pure continuous process. In bottling lines conveyer buffers need space before and after each machine, which cost a lot of money and need to be controlled by computers that link the aggregates.


#### **Table 1.**

*Main processes in beer making, their aims and the batchwise and continuous machines.*
