Crafting the perfect beer with IoT

When you kick back at the end of a hard day with a beer in hand, how do you know if it’s the best beer produced?

Alpha Acid Brewing Company was founded in 2014 in Belmont, CA., and is now distributing their unique craft beers all around the San Francisco Bay Area. They not only experiment with innovative tastes and aromas, but the production process at this California-based brewery is cutting edge, too. Alpha Acid Brewing Company is one of the very few craft breweries in the world to embrace the Internet of Things. See Video explaining the Art and Science of Brewing Beer

Like any craft brewer, manual work and testing has long been part of the process, with workers manually taking samples and analyzing in-production beer to determine when the product is ready to transition to the next of the 8 brewing phases.

The brewing process:

For generations, this process has remained relatively untouched.

• Beginning in the brew house, different types of malt are crushed together in order to extract fermentable sugars and produce a milled product called grist.
• The grist gets transferred into a mash tun, where it is mixed with hot water in a process called mash conversion. The conversion process uses natural enzymes in the malt to break the malt’s starch into sugars.
• The mash is then pumped into the lauter tun, where a sweet liquid (known as wort) is separated from the grain husks.
• The wort is then collected in a vessel called a kettle, where it is brought to a controlled boil before the hops are added.
• After boiling, the wort is transferred into a whirlpool for the wort separation stage. During this stage, any malt or hop particles are removed to leave a liquid that is ready to be cooled and fermented.
• To start the fermentation, yeast is added during the filling of the vessel to convert the sugary wort into beer by producing alcohol, a wide range of flavors, and carbon dioxide (used later in the process to give beer its sparkle).
• After fermentation, the young “green” beer needs to be matured in order to allow both a full development of flavors and a smooth finish.
• After reaching its full potential, the beer is filtered, carbonated, and transferred to the bright beer tank, where it goes through a cellaring process that takes 3-4 weeks to complete.

As you can see, it’s a very delicate and fine-tuned process. Moving to the next stage too early or too late negatively impacts the quality. But working together with Oracle, The App Lab, a collection of analysis tools, and a myriad of sensors, relayr implemented IoT and cloud computing technologies to automate and optimize the brewing process. The system collects real-time data, streamlines production, and improves operations.

The IoT solution enables Kyle, the owner of Alpha Acid Brewing Company, to understand if the process is in balance temperature-wise and be aware of any variations between different tanks of beer. He can use the custom-made app on his smartphone to get real-time readings and alerts – a far cry from relying on intuition, recipe, and manual processes. The next natural step would be to use the gathered data and leverage it to continue to improve the process, prevent problems before they happen, and automate the labor intensive method of crafting beer.  

“It’s very useful to be able to monitor the temperature through a phone, get real-time readings. We can take data that will help us make better beer. Production has definitely improved with getting all this data from the sensors” Kyle says.

As part of this project, Oracle developed an app with different user interface elements for the people who are actually consuming the beer. Beer lovers can rate the different products, the rating data is then stored and analyzed in the Oracle Cloud Service as a continuous feedback loop for Alpha Acid Breweries. This means Kyle can get information on the quality measurements of his beer while it’s brewing, as well as feedback from customers.

While IoT is improving the brewing process, Kyle will continue to hone his passion for crafting beer and use the knowledge he gathers from IoT to continuously make a better brew.