quality products from barley
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| Great know-how in the production of ethanol |
Altia's Grain Industry is the biggest manufacturer of ethanol in Finland. The grain raw material starts its journey in the fields of a Finnish farmer. The barley is grown in unpolluted conditions, threshed, dried and supplied to the Koskenkorva plant where its quality is tested and inspected, and the accepted load is stored in silos until it is ground in Finland's biggest barley mill. The husks are screened out and the barley flour is filled in with pure groundwater. Enzymes are added to the raw material which is used in the manufacture of ethanol. It is heated by steam to a temperature at which starch turns into a paste, crystallizes and becomes fermentable. The mash resulting in the boiling process is cooled and sent to the fermenting tanks. Fermentation by yeast is a continuous process, and at the end the mash has an alcoholic content of about 11 per cent by volume. The fermented mash is sent to the distillery where the ethanol is separated from the draff which is used to produce feed, Next, the ethanol is purified by running it through several columns where it is distilled hundreds of times. Impurities are removed in this process, and the alcoholic content rises to 90 per cent by volume. The whole fermentation and distilling process of grain ethanol takes about 45 hours.
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| From barley into branded products |
Altia's vodka-based beverages are made from high-quality grain ethanol produced by the Koskenkorva plant at Ilmajoki, in the fertile plains of southern Ostrobothnia. Altia has also developed a new, integrated production process which yields ethanol as well as starch and feed. Altia's Grain Industry uses annually about 150 million kg of domestic barley, I.e. one tenth of the country's total barley crop. The diversified production process allows to recover all 25 million litres of grain ethanol, 40 million kg of barley starch and 60 million kg of feed raw materials. Also the carbon dioxide released in the fermentation process is recovered. The alcoholic beverages produced by Altia are bottled by the Rajamäki plant at Nurmijärvi. The product range includes over a hundred items. Altia is known, above all, as a vodka producer and vodkas - or equivalent - make up a large part of the company's production. In addition to spirits, vodkas and flavoured alcoholic beverages, also imported wines, cognacs, whiskies, fortified wines and liqueurs are bottled at Rajamäki.
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| Finnish vodka |
Only vodkas produced in Finland - and by Altia - are allowed to carry the European Union's Vodka of Finland label, which proves that the vodka is a one-hundred-per-cent Finnish product, made and bottled in Finland. At present, three Altia products bear the Vodka of Finland label, i.e. Finlandia Vodka, Koskenkorva Vodka and Dry Vodka.
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| Rajamäki, an efficient alcoholic beverage factory |
The alcoholic beverages produced and bottled by Altia in Finland are bottled at the Rajamäki plant. Naturally filtered pure groundwater is added to the grain ethanol and the flavours required for certain beverages are put in according to the specifications. The produced batch is released for bottling only after its alcoholic content, purity, conformity with the recipe, and all the other perceptible properties have been checked and verified to ensure the high quality of the alcoholic beverage. The annual production capacity at Rajamäki is 100 million bottles. There are six bottling lines and they fill 7, 000 - 45, 000 bottles an hour. Roughly 50 million recycled bottles, supplied by A-Pullo, are used to fill the alcoholic beverages sold in Finland. The alcoholic beverages are stored at Rajamäki and supplied to the market through its Dispatch Centre. The warehouse holds a maximum of 8.5 million bottles and, filled to capacity, it can effect deliveries during a whole month. Thirty or forty truckloads of alcoholic beverages leave the Dispatch Centre every day to make delivery to customers in Finland and abroad. |
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