Remote automatic process control systems for small breweries

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Our industry partner, Amber Brewery, has been making small-batch craft beer in the GTA for 17 years. Amber Brewery is dedicated to creating the most drinkable craft beers at the lowest prices possible. Its Toronto House beer is the result of over 20 years of testing and carefully perfecting a clean-tasting lager. In the brewing process, each brew has a primary fermentation of 7 days at 9°C and is then aged between 5-6 weeks at 5°C before undergoing clean filtration. Keeping the process precise to guarantee the quality of every batch is of paramount importance to the company. Through the years, all these steps have been conducted manually: staff are required to carefully monitor the temperature, humidity, and level of fermentation for each brew and switch on/off various valves to maintain quality control. In this proposed research we aim to develop a remote process control system to advance Amber Brewery's methods with digital technologies. A local computer will be configured as the control center, and other computers or smart phones will be able to remotely access this control center to adjust an array of valves, establishing a significantly improved production process. This will be a significant step towards process automation in the craft brewery industry, reducing human errors and effectively boosting product quality. Even though some automation systems are available in the market - e.g., Siemens's Braumat 7.0, Proleit's Brewmaxx, etc. - these systems are designed for large breweries that are able to incur a high design cost and high maintenance cost, which is not feasible for small companies like Amber Brewery. In this project, we aim to design a cost-effective automation system for smaller breweries. There is a considerable market for this proposed technology, as there are over 50 small craft breweries just in Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that could benefit from this product.