For the first time in its history, traditional family owned company Mast-Jägermeister SE extended its line of herbal liqueurs with a super-premium product called Jägermeister Manifest. 

The process of making this product involves the complex extra extraction of more than 56 herbs through a two-stage aging process using small and large oak barrels to achieve an alcohol content of 38% by volume. The result is a nuanced composition that sets a new standard of taste.

“Although legally this is defined as an herbal liqueur, we have, in fact, created a product that is so unique it deserves to be in a category of its own,” says Dr. Berndt Finke, head of R&D, products and quality for Mast-Jägermeister. “The notes produced from the barrel aging blend harmoniously with the herbs to create a genuine super-premium liqueur for connoisseurs.”

Achieving super-premium purity levels

This new product presented new challenges for the Jägermeister liqueur experts. “The fact that Jägermeister Manifest has so many ingredients meant we were facing different types of challenges in production that we had never seen before,” says Finke. “Storage in wooden barrels introduces phenolic compounds into the liqueur. These compounds polymerize after a few months of storage and can sometimes result in a cloudy appearance. This visual phenomenon does not comply with our approach to quality, which is to achieve nothing short of perfection.”

Because the spirits maker had been implementing filtration solutions from Eaton for many years, both companies worked together to find an optimal solution that would resolve this issue.

Sustainable removal of haze-causing substances

A standard filtration solution would not be sufficient to meet the requirements of this complex product, so Eaton conducted targeted experiments with Jägermeister Manifest in the manufacturer’s laboratory in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. 

The BECO INTEGRA® LAB 220™, a portable filtration unit with pump and round filter, was used to perform extensive tests on different types of depth filter sheets on a small scale. The final filtration solution was subsequently scaled up to the actual production plant, making it easier to find suitable depth filter sheets and cost savings. 

Results from the Jägermeister laboratory test indicated that the most effective way to remove the haze-causing substances was to combine the depth filter sheets from the BECO® standard and BECO SELECT A™ ranges. This involved using Eaton’s BECODISC® stacked disc cartridges from the BS range with a retention rate of 2.5 µm as the prefilter and BECODISC BA 20 with a retention rate of 0.8 µm for fine filtration.

The depth filter sheets in the stacked disc cartridges feature a large-volume cavity providing a particularly high haze-removal capacity. The pore structure not only enables the components requiring separation to be reliably retained, but also results in an economic service life. During the downstream fine filtration process, the liqueur passes through the stacked disc cartridges, which were specially developed for applications in the spirits industry. 

The filters retain the finest particles, as well as specifically retain long-chain fatty acid esters that cause haze in the liqueur and can have a negative effect on the sensory profile and taste. Short-chain fatty acid esters, adding sensory qualities to the liqueur, can pass through the filter material almost entirely. 

A special feature of these filter sheets is the low iron, calcium and magnesium ion content that can cause haze and discoloration in alcoholic products. Moreover, because the material only adsorbs a minimum amount of color, the dark copper tones of Mast-Jägermeister’s premium herbal liqueur remain unaffected. “We use these stacked disc cartridges to cold filter the Jägermeister Manifest—that is, we cool the product down to between 30°F and 32°F so that the haze-causing substances can be safely removed by the filters,” Finke says.

“Eaton's solution will keep Jägermeister Manifest clear and undamaged,” Finke adds. “The choice of filters fits our needs exactly, as they precisely cover the range of substances responsible for turbidity. The stacked disc cartridges not only give us the exact result we want, but they also have a long service life and are easy to use.”

For more information, visit www.eaton.com