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Meura in Mexico

In less than 1 year Meura built a complete new brewhouse with a production capacity of 12 million hectoliters!

In 2017, Grupo Modelo announced the construction of a greenfield brewery plant in Apan (Hidalgo), about 2 hours from Mexico city.
The project was ambitious and the challenge very exciting: building a brewery from scratch having an initial annual capacity of 12 million hectolitres and expected to double in the near future!

Mexico is ranked 4th in the global beer production with a volume of about 120mio hl beer per year!
The national beer market is led by 2 international companies: Grupo Modelo (ABInBev) and Heineken Mexico.
The story of Grupo Modelo started in 1925 with the inauguration of the first brewery in Mexico City and the production of Corona beer. Soon the brewery expanded and in 1928 the Corona sales reached 8 million bottles! Since then the Brewery never stopped increasing the beer production.
Today, Grupo Modelo owns a total of 7 big breweries in Mexico and produces about 55 mio hl beer per year! It became fully part of ABInBev in 2013.

In 2017, Grupo Modelo announced the construction of a greenfield brewery plant in Apan (Hidalgo), about 2 hours from Mexico city.
The project was ambitious and the challenge very exciting: building a brewery from scratch having an initial annual capacity of 12 million hectolitres and expected to double in the near future!

Grupo Modelo awarded Boccard Shanghai (a sister company of Meura) for the raw material handling and the two brewhouses to Meura. Boccard Meura Mexico took also part in the project and was in charge of the local purchasing and assistance to the project management. Boccard Argentina was responsible for the on-site vessel manufacturing (see article here-under).
Meura as the main brewhouse contractor was entrusted with the installation of 2 complete brewhouses of 1200 hl cold wort.

It took ONLY 12 months from the time of ordering to first brew! Both brewhouses have been equipped with 1 Classicmill, 2 Meura2001 with Meuraclean, 1 Mechamasher, a Meurastream (energy saving concept) including the Ecostripper, among others!

Some figures can give a better idea of the size of this project:

• A peak of 425 sub-contractors on site working 24/7
• More than 14 km of piping installed
100 tanks with sizes from 150hl to 3000hl
• More than 70,000 inches welded
223 km of cables of all kinds installed
213 containers used for transport

For the raw material handling, Boccard Shanghai provided the following customised equipment:
Malt and rice intake pits with dedusting as well as starch intake (trucks emptying by pneumatical transport)
2 automatic sampling units for sampling raw material into truck prior to discharging
12 malt silos of 1200 tons double skin
6 stainles steel starch silos of 120 tons
6 speciality malt and rice silos of 120 tons
mechanical transfer (chains conveyors, buckets elevators) from silos block to milling plant into various batch /dialy buffer bins for different malts & adjuvants
4 milling lines including cleaning, milling (MEURA Classicmill) and grist bins.
Starch bins
• mashing-in from grist bin by MEURA Mechamashers


The project schedule has been respected and the plant could be finished on the contractual date! Today the Apan plant of Grupo Modelo employs 600 people and produces 12 million hectolitres beer 

 

BOCCARD ARGENTINA, a sister company of Meura, has been in charge of the on-site construction of several tanks in the APAN project.
For maximum efficiency, Boccard Argentina decided to build 18 tanks ON SITE and created a mobile workshop on the brewery site.
First a huge concrete base of 400 m² was built. Automatic welding machines and all the required equipment were imported from Argentina. The stainless steel coils were imported directly from Europe. A team of 15 people have worked on site and manufactured the tanks.

This offered major advantages such as:
• reduced costs (less transport…)
• time saved thanks to proximity:once finished the tanks could be erected at once
• quality assured by highly trained people


On site vessels manufacturing is the ideal solution to reduce transport costs for large brewhouse!