A&G Engineering is an Australian, family-owned company that has grown from humble beginnings to become Australia’s leading designer and fabricator of stainless-steel tanks and vessels. The company has an outstanding reputation in the winery and brewery markets, as well as throughout the dairy, water treatment and petrochemical industries.
Through continuous product and process innovation, A&G has thrived through almost 60 years of economic ups and downs and industry boom and bust cycles.
The culture of innovation is exemplified by the founder of the business, Ron Potter, a winemaker at Miranda Wines in Griffith back in the day when red wine was fermented in concrete storage tanks.
With an engineering background and an enquiring mind, Potter saw an opportunity to use stainless steel tanks to replace the age-old method of in-ground concrete fermentation tanks, and, in 1963, he established A&G Engineering. Before long, A&G developed the Potter Fermenter, a self-draining stainless steel fermentation tank that quickly became the standard for Australia’s wine industry, and also adopted around the world.
Despite its success, the original Potter Fermenter still required the winemaker to rake the wine after fermentation to remove skins, which was a laborious and time-consuming process. Potter again turned his mind to the problem and developed the Sweeping Arm Potter Fermenter (“SWAP”) that automatically unloaded skins from the fermenter without any manual labour. This design remains the industry standard in Australia today.
A&G’s contribution to the wine industry has been significant; the processing innovations developed by the business resulted in faster fermentation and quantum improvements in the colour and quality of red wine in Australia and globally.
In 1987, Potter and fellow A&G owner and lifetime business partner Lionel Irving joined forces with another local winemaker, Andrew Craig, and the three men set up Flavourtech, a manufacturing technology company also based in Griffith. Flavourtech developed and mastered the unique Spinning Cone Column (SCC) technology, a processing solution originally developed to remove sulphur from grape juice in the wine making process, thus improving the taste, smell and quality of wine globally.
It was soon realised that SCC technology could be applied to a wide range of industries where there was a need to capture desired – or remove undesired – flavours and aromas.
Today, Flavourtech is a global technology manufacturer still headquartered in Griffith, specialising in aroma recovery, extraction and evaporation solutions for the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries, and exporting to 60 countries around the world. A&G are responsible for building all of Flavourtech’s plants, and this close partnership has held both businesses in good stead.
A&G were one of the first fabricators in Australia to adopt Plasma TIG welding and are the only domestic fabricator to have implemented its unique PAM (Precision Automated Manufacturing) technique in its three dedicated tank fabrication workshops. In addition to ensuring consistency, repeatability and quality in production, PAM removes a range of manual handling tasks that result in a safer workplace, and in the hands of the A&G workforce, PAM creates formidable production capacity with certainty of quality. The process has also been adapted to the site build projects that A&G completes and, using this methodology, A&G has the stand alone capability nationally to manufacture vessels up to a massive 5,000,000 litre capacity without the need for working at heights, therefore ideally suited to the needs of Australia’s industrial and petrochemical markets.
In recent times A&G developed its own Dairy Silo design for vessels with 150,000-220,000L capacity. In recognition of the varying environmental and operational conditions that a dairy processor may be dealing with, the design is intended to be adaptable to a variety of different conditions. This helps the customer achieve their desired outcomes of affordable but uncompromised safety in design and a quality manufactured product, meaning the A&G Dairy Silo design is fast becoming the industry benchmark as a result.
The spirit of innovation is now entrenched as part of the culture at A&G, and combined with almost six decades of experience, it continues to deliver remarkable results for A&G clients. In 2019 A&G were awarded the Australian Stainless Steel Development Association Manufacturing Project of the Year, for its supply to the Weilong Wines project, a state of the art 26,000T winery in Sunraysia. Meanwhile, Flavourtech’s innovations were recently recognised in winning the 2018 National Manufacturing Award at the Australian Export Awards.
For clients, the unmatched combination of experience, flexibility, expertise and technology for every A&G project serve to minimise production risk and ensure on-time, on-budget and as-specified delivery.
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Ready to find out how A&G can help you? Talk to our expert team by calling us on (02) 6964 3422 or email sales@agengineering.com.au with your inquiry. We look forward to hearing from you.
