FEATURE SCADA & DATA ACQUISITION
AUTOMATED ARTISTRY for craft beer production
Emilian Axinia, industry manager for Food and Beverage at COPA-DATA, discusses how automation in the brewing industry is helping support the growth of ‘craft beers’, delivering competitive advantage through flexibility at a reasonable cost
B
rewing is not so much a production method, but an art form; the recent craft beer trend is a testament to this fact. The number of European breweries has grown by 75% in the last five years alone, and there are now breweries and microbreweries dedicated to revitalising ancient recipes, using locally sourced produce and unusual ingredients. The craft beer mindset produces beer
which focuses on the brew master's innovation and skills, consciously moving away from mass production. You would think that automation systems, more associated with mass production, wouldn't be part of this new brewing revolution. You'd be wrong though, as the freedom and experimentation of the modern day brew masters is supported and augmented by sophisticated automation systems, as explained here. System architecture for brewers might be PLC based or the software might be hardware independent, running on just an embedded industrial PC with display and bus I/Os. It doesn't really matter; the salient point is there's software out there that can handle basic control, batch control, recipe control and produce visualisations of the whole process.
BATCH CELL CONTROL When producing beer there are many different stages - mashing, boiling, fermenting and each of these is carried out by a batch cell - such as the mash kettle, lauter tun, wort kettle and whirlpool. These all have different functional capabilities. For example, transfer in, add water, heat, mix, transfer out and so on. Without a control system, valves would have to be opened and closed, cells turned on and off and samples taken, all by manual methods. In addition, most breweries make a
selection of different beers. Even producing the same beer for different vessels - bottles or kegs - requires slight variations of the recipe. The brewing process of two different beers is never the same, which shows just how complex the processes taking place in a brewery are. Having a control system with pre-
16 JUNE 2015 | PROCESS & CONTROL
programmed phases dependent on recipes reduces the engineering effort and likelihood of human error. That's not to say that it takes skilled human workers out of the system, but it cuts down their workload and ensures they can focus on other, more important tasks. These systems provide the brew master with greater control and better repeatability.
GET THE RIGHT RESULT A reliable automation solution helps achieve expected results in a timely manner, and also maximises repeatability and eliminates wastage. For example, yeast is a living thing and
because of this it needs specific conditions to produce the best results in a beer. There are many different strains of yeast used for brewing, but they can be segregated into two main categories: top- fermenting and bottom-fermenting. The first is mainly used for brewing ales, porters, stouts, and wheat beers and the second is used for lager style beers. Different types of yeast have different optimal temperatures. A quality automated control system with changeable pre-recorded recipe phases allows flexibility and ease when changing between production of different beers. This provides brew masters with the peace of mind that batches won't have to
Mass production or micro brewery – there is affordable automation software out there that can aid production
be discarded due to incorrect temperatures, ingredient quantities, time durations or batch numbers. Another benefit of controlling the brew using an automation system is that each phase, as well as the whole process, can be monitored. This can be done using a single HMI, multiple ones or even through remote data access, depending on the size and capabilities of the brewery. The authorised user can undertake
different tasks, like creating control recipes based on templates, adjusting certain recipe parameters, starting recipes and supervising the process. This mimics the creativity of craft beer methods. Paradoxically, with this freedom there's
also the added safety harness of control. Users are able to monitor each phase of the process in real time and take any corrective action, should alarms occur. In addition, the process data for every
brew can be archived for traceability purposes. Moreover, in this age of big data, information about efficiency and material consumption or analyses of quality are typically stored to learn from, and help enhance future batches.
WHAT’S YOUR TIPPLE? Regardless of a company’s tipple of choice - lager, wheat beer, mass produced or microbrewery - there is affordable automation software out there that can aid production. Any brewing system could benefit from the whole zenon Product Family. This means a small project can be easily expanded to larger applications, for example encompassing more production units with different volumes and more complex control modules. So, if a microbrewery need to expand, it doesn’t need to change the industrial automation software.
The ‘craft beer
revolution’ has seen a multitude of
microbreweries springing up, particularly in the UK and USA
Good automation technology can help everyone in food & beverage production and system integration be more successful by delivering competitive advantage through flexibility at a reasonable cost. It provides the control, so the brew master is free to create.
COPA-DATA
www.copadata.co.uk
Enter 215 / PROCESS&CONTROL
35th Anniversary
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