rm’s Brewhouse is a five-barrel (5BBL) craft brewery which operates out of 14th century farm buildings on the Ormside Hall
Estate in rural Cumbria. However, the difficulty of operating in premises from another age militates against the brewery’s ambition to create the perfect pint. Ian Purves, director, insists that the brewery has to respect the ‘soul’ of the place where the beer is made. After all, the age and history of the premises underpin the Viking story that the Orm’s Brewhouse brand tells its customers. When the Brewhouse was founded in 2025, the ancient building was equipped with refurbished vessels, pumps and extraction pumps. But, while this was mechanically sound, from a control and automation perspective it was extremely limited. The control panel offered little more than basic start/stop functionality – it provided for no recipe management, no automated dosing, no alarms and no meaningful process feedback. Critical brewing stages relied heavily on manual intervention, with volumes estimated, temperatures adjusted by experience rather than data, and additions timed manually. This created the risk of inconsistent beer quality, wasted water and ingredients, unnecessary energy use and limited scope to scale production with confidence. Purves and brewer Chris Stanley knew that
automation could solve the problems, helping: • Improve accuracy and repeatability without removing brewer control • Reduce risk and stress on brew day, while providing visibility into what the process is actually doing • Keep the system flexible, open and future proof.
To provide these benefits, the automation system needed to be open and modular, so that the brewery could retain existing systems, helping avoid the high up-front capital cost entailed in discarding equipment before the end of its useful life. According to Purves, this decision to ‘build on what we started with’ was in tune with the ethos of WAGO’s engineers, who are experienced in implementing modular systems which combine best-of-breed equipment from multiple vendors. Purves commented: “The WAGO engineers did not come to us with a product catalogue, they came for a conversation.” WAGO’s application engineering team began with a site visit, working closely with the brewers to understand the process, the constraints of the historic estate and the brewery’s long-term ambitions. Together with Orm’s Brewhouse, they decided that the brewery had three main
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available throughout the process. This meant that the most important parts of the brewing process were automated: • Automated Hot Liquor Tank (HLT) temperature control, compensating for ambient conditions
• Precise water dosing using flow sensors • Safety cut-offs and alarms to protect equipment and prevent unplanned downtime. The control software was engineered from the
requirements for the automation system: • Automated temperature control • Visualisation of the processes • Harnessing process data to enable continuous improvement and quality control. The WAGO solution combined new hardware with a software system which both controls the process and provides graphs, numeric read-outs and other visualisations which can be viewed both on-site and remotely.
At the heart of the upgrade was the replacement of the legacy controller with a WAGO PFC100 programmable logic controller (PLC 750-8112), which handles OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus, Ethernet IP and many other protocols. This broad support for standard industrial control technologies provides a foundation for future expansions of the system, as well as improving connectivity and monitoring capability. To bring real insight into the brewing
process, IO-Link smart temperature and other sensors from Endress+Hauser were integrated via a WAGO IO-Link Master module (750-1657). Together, the PLC and IO-Link Master provide a complete data chain from the temperature and flow sensors all the way to the cloud. This connectivity benefits from VPN firewalls and integrated cybersecurity protection to ensure that process-level components can safely be linked to higher-level systems and to the internet to enable remote access. Now, for the first time, accurate measurements
of flow, temperature and viscosity were available in the brewhouse or remotely via the cloud, alongside reliable volume measurements
ground up around Orm’s actual brewing process, rather than forcing it to fit a generic template. Alongside the automation equipment, a new Web Panel 400 10.1” display provides clear visibility of each brewing stage, giving brewers confidence in what the system is doing at all times. On the benefits, Stanley commented: “The
first time that I saw the flow meter hit the target and the pump just automatically stop, I realised just how precise we could make the whole brewing process.”
The upgraded system supports recipe entry and storage, visualisation of water dosing during mashing, and automated prompts for key additions during the boil. Critical process parameters are logged, creating a growing dataset which supports consistency and continuous improvement. Temperature control during fermentation, often spanning several days, is now fully automated, including a controlled step-down chilling process at the end of fermentation to protect yeast health. When it comes time to rack, brewers know exactly how much beer is available, allowing the correct number of casks to be cleaned and prepared in advance. Furthermore, remote connectivity configured
by the Orm’s Brewhouse team allows WAGO engineers to provide support and troubleshooting without the need for site visits. This is a major advantage for a rural brewery. “Efficiency isn’t just about saving time or
ingredients – it’s what allows a small brewery like ours to grow,” said Stanley. “With WAGO’s automation in place, we finally have the visibility and control we need to trust the process from start to finish. It gives us more concentration time
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