Industries
Brewery automation
For regional and growing craft breweries: consistent beer, every brand, every batch, without a programmer for every new recipe.
Where control matters in a brewery
- Raw materials. Malt intake, milling and grist weighing, and adjunct and hop additions tracked by lot.
- Brewhouse. Mash temperature profiles, lautering, wort boiling and whirlpool, run as recipe-driven sequences with every step timed and recorded.
- Wort cooling and aeration. Knock-out temperature and oxygen control that sets up a healthy fermentation.
- Fermentation and cellar. Tank temperature profiles, yeast pitching and harvesting, dry hopping, conditioning, filtration and transfers, with routing and equipment-status controls designed to reduce cross-contamination risk between products.
- CIP. Tank and line cleaning tied to a clean-status for each vessel. More on CIP →
- Utilities. Glycol, CO2 recovery, steam, compressed air and water. Here, visibility pays off quickly in energy savings.
Why a DCS fits a growing brewery
Breweries usually start with a packaged brewhouse controller and a handful of PLCs. Growth adds brands, seasonals, contract brews, seltzers, sodas or RTD cocktails, and the recipe count climbs on the same vessels. At that point each recipe change is a risk, and production records are spread over several systems.
With ISA-88 batch control, each brand is a recipe and each vessel is a unit. Brewers adjust recipes, operators run them, and the system records the batch as it ran. How batch control works →
Diversifying beyond beer? Adding soda, seltzer or RTD lines multiplies SKUs and changeovers on shared equipment. That transition is often the moment a brewery's controls need to grow up.
Design points we pay attention to
- Integration with existing packaged brewhouse and packaging-line controls, rather than replacing equipment that works.
- Vessel and route management with clean-status interlocks.
- Batch genealogy from malt and hop lots through to packaged product. Traceability →
- Washdown-suitable panels and instruments in the brewhouse and cellar. Hygienic design →