5 minute read
Supplier viewpoint The team from V-Brew an arm of Vitikit, considers the brewery of the future
The future brewery: what will it look like?
Joseph Hopwood and Kieran Aylward, from equipment specialist Vitikit and its brewing arm V-Brew, have taken a look in their crystal ball and offer their thoughts on what the brewery of the future might look like…
“Imagine a semi-dystopic scene where a brewer, once creative and with hard earned importance, is now subservient and arbitrary. Their lumberjack shirts and proudly groomed beards replaced with lab coats and clean shaves in a data driven drive for efficiency. The new brewhouse AI has its algorithms assimilating data from Instagram, Facebook, Untappd - combining it with data from the brewhouse sensors and schedule - and consolidating it with data from market researchers, microbiologists, climatologists and agronomists. It’s efficient. Near perfect. But creativity and humanity, the opportunity to witness intuition, even genius, is trapped outside of the rigid rules of the algorithm. The world’s beers all taste the same, and the bars’ AI chooses beers for its customers before they have even had a chance to enjoy the pop art adorning the pumps. Everybody wants to switch the machine off, but with echoes of Skynet’s famous overreaction, they are all too scared to. This world only exists in overactive imaginations, but we are currently experiencing the fourth industrial revolution - Industry 4.0, although you might not realise it yet. Many of the new and often bewildering technologies once reserved for works of science fiction are fast becoming a reality and will soon be commonplace in the brewing sector. Technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), Machine Learning and the Internet of Things are a reality now and these will have a profound impact on the future brewery as we race further into the 2020s.
Technology has always been important to brewers, with the scientifically and technologically savvy generally prospering. Think of the work of the famous scientist Emil Chr. Hansen, and how it helped create the titan that is Carlsberg. Technology ensures consistency and quality, so pursuing a high technological level is critical in maintaining high standards over time. The workhorse for many current systems in the modern brewery are Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). These are the small ruggedised computers which are found in most control cabinets in breweries big and small and have for a number of years provided brewers with a means to measure and control the processes. PLCs are in flux, with a rise in open-source PLC models based on using high level-based programming languages such as Java, C, and C++. This allows engineers to get much more out of these systems than has previously been available. It means AI algorithms can be used alongside increased connectivity between the various stages of the brewing process. The force behind all this change is data. You might ask what's the use of data? Brewers have previously had data in isolation from the various sensors and process variables. Now though, the power of bringing all of this data together is being recognised. Data lives in everything and if it is used correctly has the potential to give valuable information. It can provide brewers with a live digital dashboard on the health of their product and some examples currently exist. V-Brew, an offshoot of wine and cider specialist Vitikit, works with manufactures across the globe. From Brazil, to China, to Germany. But where the team there sees an opportunity for technological innovation, they often bring it in-house.
The Smart Pasteuriser is a good example of making data work for you. It uses predictive analytics to help determine the Pasteurisation Units accrued both past and in the future, and was built on the realisation that most producers were not accounting for residual pasteurisation. This reasonably simple step has helped reduce energy consumption, reduce cycle times and more importantly for the brewer than for the cidermaker has reduced the risk of heat damage. This advanced data collection which exists now will be what drives forward brewing to the next level - brewing has always been as much of an artform as a science and it's the science which is seeing the change. Imagine if the beer brewed had feedback from the end users which tweaked the recipe? It’s not that big a jump! Platforms like Untappd track customers’ perceptions – bars’ accounting software knows which batch the Untappd reviews relate to, hop and malt suppliers have the analysis of the batches that went into the beer and brewhouse software knows the rest. It would just be a case of bring all the data together. Analysis from the lab can also be included in the model. Beer has thousands of relevant compounds but only a few are routinely tracked. New technologies such as infrared spectroscopy can measure nearly all of them. This could also be used to predict the compounds simultaneously at different stages of the processes, in a similar but more complex version of the Vitikit smart pasteuriser. An AI algorithm could be used to take this data and make recommendations to the recipe based on user preferences, or it could spot a change in consumer tastes, and help the brewer to jump ahead of the curve.
There are more and more examples of this. Little Lion World Beverages have recently developed an app which is used to buy and sell craft beer, the app uses an AI algorithm to make recommendations to their clientele. This has helped them boost profit margins and gain rapid popularity in the sector. Contrary to our imagined dystopia, it’s unlikely any of these technologies will ever replace the brewer, or even turn them into sterile automatons. But it seems inevitable that many important decisions that would in the past be left at the discretion of the brewer or marketeer will be generated by some AI. We will see beer become tailored to specific demographics and even individuals, based on an AI interpretation of data from social platforms - and this AI can almost certainly be trusted not to, like Skynet, turn on humanity.”
