When renovating, expanding or building a brewery, your floor finishing is not a decision to be taken lightly. When choosing between concrete, coating or tile, only tile provides a long-term solution to every challenge of the brewery environment: forklift traffic with rubber abrasion; hot liquids and steam; chemicals, acids and alkalis; and heavy tanks with enormous point loads. Argelith Bodenkeramik has developed high-quality industrial tiles perfectly suited to the brewery environment – durable, long-lasting and chemical resistant. Porcelain stoneware tiles such as Hexalith tile by Argelith are fired at more than 1,200°C, making them hard, dense and extremely durable.
Safety and hygiene must be a brewer’s top priority. The ideal floor covering protects your employees from fall hazards and your product from sanitary dangers. Slip-resistant ceramic tile is easy to clean and naturally hygienic.The European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group (EHEDG), a private, state-independent organisation, has taken a critical look at the hygiene requirements of the food industry – including requirements for floor coverings – and released guidelines that outline possible solutions to common problems.
Laying a strong foundation
Planning is everything. Consider from the beginning everything that might happen to your brewery floor and how it will impact not only the floor’s surface, but the layers beneath. Once you have selected the best floor covering, install it to its best advantage, using high-quality products and experienced professional installers.
Poorly grouted joints can promote water deposits, leading to stains and providing a haven for germs. These joints are easy to detect under forklift traffic: the wheels rattle as they go over the joint, striking the tile edge. These repeated impacts on the tile edges can cause the tile to crack, breaching the protective cover it provided to the floor beneath. Whether the surface is tiled or coated, unrepaired cracks can lead to catastrophic damage as acids and alkalis seep through the floor and contaminate the chemical-susceptible concrete underneath.
Through decades of experience, Argelith has found an epoxy resin adhesive and epoxy grout, combined with vibration installation, offer the best protection against tile detachment and other floor damage. The epoxy resin creates a strong bond between the tile and the foundation and offers an additional layer of moisture and chemical protection to the foundation concrete.
As grout is more susceptible to chemical attack than tile, it is important to minimize its surface area. Hexalith tile by Argelith is designed with a built-in spacer at the edge to create narrow, even grout joints. Installing tile with the vibration method is another effective measure against joints that are too wide. Conventional installation can result in grout joints as wide as 6 to 10 mm, while vibration installation can produce joints as narrow as 2.5 mm. These narrow joints provide better chemical resistance, better water resistance and a better looking floor. Tiles installed with the vibration method can also be mechanically grouted, a faster and more efficient means of completely filling grout joints.
Slip resistance & hygiene
Combining slip resistance with hygiene is a delicate balance. Modern porcelain stoneware tiles are produced using a dry press; the slip resistance profile is stamped into the individual tiles during the pressing process. This has significant advantages over synthetic resins, which are typically mixed with additives to create a gritty texture for slip resistance. Since the tile’s slip resistance comes from a raised surface rather than a gritty substance, it releases soil easily and is far easier to clean than a synthetic resin.
Argelith offers several surface profiles adapted to the areas of application. The more slippery an environment, the rougher the surface. For example, technical regulations for workplaces require an R10 surface for wet areas of the fermenting cellar for optimal safety (ASR A1.5/1,2).
The most important consideration for all food and drink manufacturers is hygiene. No company wants to sicken its customers or run afoul of strict legal standards. As a provider of flooring to the food industry, Argelith Bodenkeramik is a member of EHEDG, which offers consulting services to material, machine and component manufacturers serving the industry. The goal of EHEDG is to identify and prevent potential hygiene risks before they occur. Argelith tiles are also approsed by the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points Concept (HACCP). This international system is intended to ensure food quality and safety through such measures as comprehensive cleaning instructions and hygiene requirements.
Cleaning behaviour
Dry cleaning? That's easy, water and done!
Unfortunately, maintenance in a food and drink facility is not that simple. Regular and thorough cleaning of floors and equipment is mandatory.
Argelith porcelain stoneware, with its mvtec technology, is naturally hygienic and easy to clean. As a brewer, your primary focus should be on producing beer, not on interpreting complicated cleaning instructions.
Micro-compacted porcelain stoneware tiles from Argelith are manufactured from high-quality materials and, with a water absorption capacity of less than 0.1% and resistance to acids and alkalis, offer a surface that can be cleaned quickly and easily. The tiles’ finish, combined with Argelith’s mvtec technology, protects the floor from abrasion. Resistance to absorption, abrasion and chemical exposure makes an Argelith floor wonderfully stain resistant. Unlike coatings, which wear under use and must be resealed and reapplied, an Argelith floor maintains its durability year after year, saving you time and money.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is not the primary concern in industrial applications, but it has become more important in recent years, as breweries are focusing on transparency for their customers. The public has come to expect breweries to provide guided tours, tastings and other experiences.
When welcoming customers into your facility, the last thing you want to display is a dirty, cracked or peeling floor. Tile offers a long-term solution for a floor that is tough under the strain of production but beautiful to behold. While other flooring materials and coatings fade over time under thermal, chemical or light exposure, full-body porcelain tile offers vivid long-term colour.
Building owners and architects have unlimited ideas when it comes to the potential for patterns and designs using tile. Hexalith is ideal for these applications; aside from the visual appeal of its hexagonal shape, its small size and honeycomb-like structure allow for many pattern options. And with its durable nature and resistance to fading and corrosion, a properly maintained tile floor can look nearly as good after decades as it did on the day it was installed.
If you have any questions regarding your floor covering and would like to obtain information about a tile covering, please contact us.
