Automated process-control system for breweries

According to the company, the benefit of Braumat Compact's process control system is a built-in flexibility that allows smaller-sized breweries to automate as little or as much of the production process as they wish to control or can afford to.

The system allows the user to tap into all the critical facets of the brewing process, from the brew-house to the fermentation cellar, with overall centralised control.

Built into the system is a set of pre-defined monitoring tools that run systematic checks over the entire brewing process, allowing a master brewer and staff to view all the critical elements using a centralised overview display, faceplates, trends, batch reports, recipe viewers and production schedulers.

A good example is the ability to scan all of the fermenter actual values and instantly see that, for instance, one fermenter temperature is 3.8C lower than it should be.

All automatically-collected data can be viewed on Excel spreadsheets.

The system's compact design and scalability makes it easier for a brewery to start small and grow in size as required.

A modular design means that additional automation controls can be integrated within the system's infrastructure so that requirements to produce more product can be implemented without the need to overhaul a system or employ more staff.

Another tool, the Recipe Unit Procedure (RUP) Viewer, provides staff with clear graphical displays for monitoring and viewing the status of a running recipe built on an interactive display of recipes, parameters, control modules and operations sequences.

Brewers can, for example, modify the caramel malt recipe target and then change it back for the next brew if required.

The Braumat Compact maintains product consistency through allowing the brewer to monitor the quality of brews via data evaluation tools, which can look at trends and archives and analyse the efficiency of production.

This enables easy identification of areas for improvement and also the ability to analyse brews that have exceeded expectation, for which information required for repeatability is provided.

Finally, the system can automatically adjust temperatures to match the profile during fermentation, ensuring in-built repeatability.