Unit Operations in Winery, Brewery, and Distillery Design focuses on process design for wineries, breweries, and distilleries; and fills the need for a title that focuses on the challenges inherent to specifying and building alcoholic beverage production facilities. This text walks through the process flow of grapes to wine, grain to beer, and wine and beer to distilled spirits, with an emphasis on the underlying engineering principles, the equipment involved in these processes, and the selection and design of said equipment.
- Outlines the process flow of alcoholic beverage production
- Reviews process engineering fundamentals (mass & energy balances, fluid flow, materials receiving & preparation, heat exchange, fermentation, downstream processing, distillation, ageing, packaging, utilities, control systems, and plant layout) and their application to beverage plants
- Describes the idea of sanitary design and its application to plant operation and design
- Covers critical equipment parameters for purchasing, operating, and maintaining systems
- Shows how winery/brewery/distillery can influence product "style" and how "style" can dictate design
- Features examples of calculations derived from wineries designed by the authors, end of chapter problems, and integrative in-text problems that describe real-world issues and extend understanding
Written for both engineers in the alcohol industry and non-engineers looking to understand facility design, this textbook is aimed at students, winemakers, brewers, distillers, and process engineers.
Professor Block is Marvin Sands Department Chair in Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis and holds the Ernest Gallo Endowed Chair. Since joining UC Davis, he has conducted research on various topics, from fermentation optimization methods to metabolic engineering of yeast for improved wine production, as well as more recently working on single-plant resolution irrigation sensing and control. He played a key role in designing the UC Davis LEED Platinum-certified Teaching and Research Winery. Prof. Block has received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the UC Davis Academic Senate, the highest teaching award given for teaching alone on the UC Davis campus. Prior to joining UC Davis, he worked for Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc. working on biopharmaceuticals, both in process development and in manufacturing. David holds a B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, both in Chemical Engineering.
Konrad Miller is the Director of Process Development at Solugen Inc, a Houston-based biotechnology company; and an Adjunct Professor at the University of California at Davis. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Davis, an MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Southern California, a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley; and is a licensed Professional Engineer. After earning his bachelors, Dr. Miller worked as a process engineer in the wine and spirits industry at E&J Gallo, the beer industry at Anheuser-Busch, and in the biotechnology industry at Amyris. He returned to school to study under Dr. Block, earning a PhD focused on the development reactor-engineering models of red wine fermentations. His expertise is in process development and design in the food and bioprocess industries.
