JRH Brewing increases its efficiency through a control system

Located in Johnson City, Tenn., JRH Brewing’s 5,000-square-foot brewhouse can produce 10 barrels (or 310 gallons) of beer at a time. The operation consists of four 10-barrel fermenters, one 30-barrel fermenter and a 30-barrel brite tank, the latter of which is used to clear and condition beer, including carbonation, before packaging in either kegs or cans.

All canning of JRH Brewing’s Tree Streets Pale Ale, the brewery’s biggest seller, is outsourced to a mobile canning unit that comes to the brewhouse whenever necessary.

“From the day we brew our beer, to the day it’s packaged, takes about a month,” says John Henritze, owner of JRM Brewing.

Henritze had bought the brewhouse equipment for his operation as a turnkey package from an OEM in Virginia and learned that its design, especially most of its manual controls, were not located within easy reach. Brewing days became workouts.

“When I first bought the brewhouse, there were things I immediately noticed weren’t optimal with the process,” he says. “Most all the hand valves are located far away from the brewing platform, mainly because that’s just where they were put.”

So, while one hand valve for controlling beer flow from the brew pots was on the brewing platform, the temperature gauge was several steps down off the brewing platform (about 10 yards away), near the heat exchanger.

“And the manual valve for the cold liquor tank was another 10 yards further,” Henritze adds.

If all his back and forth running between gauges, valves and controls wasn’t enough of a problem, Henritze found precision to be an issue. “I’d be running the pumps between tanks, then running down steps to read the temperatures, which have to be managed precisely,” he says.

The result was inconsistent liquid transfers with temperature variations that would affect the quality of the end brew product.

“If the temperature crept up, I’d have to run back over to the platform, run up the steps, slightly adjust the knob and then run back down to the temperature gauge,” he adds. “It was like an old TV comedy, but I’d rather not have the workout and be able to focus more on making great beer.”

Fortunately, one of Henritze’s best customers was a digitalization and automation provider’s automation engineer, with whom he happened to mention his brewing issues. Given the engineer’s intimate knowledge of the provider’s (for the process and manufacturing industries) industrial automation and control capabilities, it became obvious that JRH Brewing’s operations would be an ideal application for a SIMATIC solution.

At the conclusion of a discovery process, he designed a control system consisting of three primary components: a programmable logic controller, a comfort panel human-machine interface (HMI) and a variable frequency drive (VFD).

The PLC provides the brewery flexibility and efficiency to perform basic automation tasks associated with managing the various temperatures and valves Henritze was trying to manage manually. Its compact, space-saving design helps minimize its impact on the brewing platform’s limited space.

The HMI features a 7-inch diagonal touchscreen, along with 16 million high-resolution colors. It provides a visual process diagram and dashboard for Henritze to see and interact with any stage of his brewing operation. In addition, it uses SIMATIC WinCC Basic software to enable a small supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to be deployed across the brewery equipment.

And, the VFD is a general purpose vector drive that controls the 2-horsepower, centrifugal pumps used to transfer wort, along with other liquids, between tanks and pots. A 200V model was deployed.

With the SIMATIC automation and control system in place, JRH Brewing has increased the productivity and efficiency of its operations, Henritze reports.

“When we first tried it out, I was just amazed,” he recalls. “I could literally just stand there and push the button to get the pumps going to start the transfer. I don’t have to run up and down steps anymore. It’s made a phenomenal difference in our operations and business.”

Siemens
(800) 743-6367