As breweries grow, their instrumentation can be integrated with a larger system
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industry shares the belief that ‘we’re all in it together.’ Chadwick explained that the craſt brew movement is still growing; there are still potential craſt brew customers in the world. If someone tries a craſt brew for the first time and does not like it, they might never return to try another one, so every craſt brew that goes out must be of top quality or it hurts the entire craſt brew industry. Jason Gardner adds that quality is trickier to manage when your ingredients are natural products. When you work with natural products, the process is not as cut- and-dried as with manufactured ingredients. More adjustments are necessary in the process. Additionally, processes that do not perform to some standard are not necessarily thrown away as they are in other industries. Instead, the processes might be modified or they might be used with other ingredients in a different way. Temperature control can be a factor. As
the seasons change, and the temperatures vary within the brewing plants, the process
6 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
MAKING AND MANAGING LIQUID MEASUREMENTS CAN BE TRICKY
can be somewhat faster or slower than at other times during the year. Or for other reasons, fermentation can be ‘stalled’ – it stops – and might need extra testing to determine the reason and outcome. It’s because this is an issue at some breweries, that breweries such as Bell’s maintain accurate temperature controls for their fermenters to keep the process identical, year-round. Chadwick adds one more reason for
testing – contamination. He says: ‘Bell’s is consistently looking for anything out of the ordinary and accomplishes this with a variety of tools, from a vigilant quality control team who routinely measure and analyse samples, to sensory panels where the
brewery staff sample and taste each batch throughout the fermentation process, as well as before and aſter packaging. All this testing, of course, generates a vast amount of data, which in turn creates computing needs related to these efforts.’
Unique needs in brewing’s scientific computing Beyond the use of unique instruments such as the Anton Paar alcolyzer, the fact that brewers use natural products makes their LIMS and ELNs needs highly specialised. According to Gardner, this is what sets his system apart from other customers, he encounters when he goes to user group meetings. While other industries speak of their quality control manufacturing processes as repeatable and rigid, brewing requires quite a lot of flexibility. In fact, he says it is not uncommon to deviate from written processes in order to react to unexpected analytical findings during brewing. Tat is not to say they do things
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Bell’s Brewery Inc.
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