How aX Brew Will Take Your Brewery to the Next Level (Part 1)

Brewing is fundamentally a batch process, and for thousands of years, batches were made by hand. Then came the Industrial Revolution, and breweries started to introduce automated equipment to reduce the need for manual labor. Today, even the smallest of breweries are able to employ some automated processes.

But not all automation solutions are created equal. The kinds of processes that need to be automated vary widely by industry, which is why it pays to select an automation system that has been designed specifically for craft brewing. Ideally, it should also be an integrated system that is able to automate every single stage of the process, from brewhouse to cellar.

But how exactly will an integrated, brewery-specific automation solution like automationX Brew help your business?

Simply put, aX Brew has been designed to cut down on the time you spend managing and maintaining equipment, so that you can focus on the art of brewing the best beer possible. It’s not designed to replace your creativity, but to facilitate it.

In this two-part blog series, we explore some of the specific ways aX Brew will help take your brewery operations to the next level – starting with productivity and quality.

Improved productivity

aX Brew can help you significantly increase barrel count without adding new staff or equipment.

Automation allows you to reduce the time required for many steps in the brewing cycle, thus increasing overall brewing capacity without additional equipment or personnel. In some cases, reductions of 50% are possible, which can increase total capacity by 25-30%.

In addition, automation can also minimize wastage of resources at each step, thus increasing barrels produced per unit of raw material. For instance, many mash filtration systems can be made more efficient through reduction of manual data-testing, reporting, and adjustments. An automated process can greatly reduce moisture content in the spent grain in lauter tuns, thus saving gallons of valuable wort that would otherwise have gone to waste.

By increasing precision and efficiency, breweries can achieve a marked improvement in productivity while reducing costs through resource wastage.

Improved Quality and Consistency

aX Brew also enables higher brew quality and consistency through the automation of labor-intensive manual tasks.

Human error can often be the source of quality problems. This is especially so in food and beverage industries, where the consistency of your production process is only as strong as its weakest link.

Even a partially automated brewery can run into quality problems if a staff member makes a mistake in one step of the process. This could be a physical error like misreading the gravity in a fermenter, or a data transfer error between partially automated systems, like entering the wrong numbers in an Excel spreadsheet.

aX Brew solves this problem by integrating the automation of your entire plant under one system. This greatly reduces both physical and data transfer errors, as the computerized system can handle most of these tasks by itself.