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WINEMAKING tomation and electronic devices." Bret Larreau of Key Technology, which produces state-of-the-art sorting equipment, does the vast majority of its business with crops other than grapes. "The wine industry," he says, "generally is a late adopter." In following up, I contacted several breweries in the Bay Area, which proved beneficial since I could get a free beer when I dropped in for an interview. The Pyramid Brewery and Alehouse in Berkeley is a good example of high tech in the service of craft beer. The Berkeley brewery, launched in 1997, is one of two pro- duction facilities that supplies brews to a small string of beer and food establishments on the West Coast; its annual production is about 140,000 barrels. (Fun Beer Fact No. 1: Beer volume is measured in 31-gallon "barrels," even at establishments that use only tanks.) That makes it one of the larger craft breweries in the United States—though only a drop in the Budweiser bucket—and it still wins its share of medals in craft brew competitions. Head brewer Simon Pesch ticks off some of the features of the facility: a proprietary PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) that operates the brewhouse, the tank in which grain mash is extracted into liquid wort; temperature control at every point in the cellar; flow meters that keep track of water, beer and waste movement, plus clean-in-place technology for tanks and fermentors, in which conductivity is metered as a guide to chemical strength and sani- tation processing. Some things that could be more fully automat- ed—testing for turbidity and haze, for example—are handled in a highly functional analysis lab. On the other side of town, Trumer Pils, an outpost of an Austrian brewery, turns out 25,000 barrels of pilsner using what brewmaster Lars Larson calls a "semi-automated" system. After grain is automati- cally moved from the storage silo to hoppers with the press of a button, ScottLabs_Aug10.qxp 6/29/10 3:58 PM Page 1 Brewmaster Lars Larson produces 25,000 barrels of Trumer Pils us- ing a "semi-automated" system (above) in Berkeley, Calif. an Allen-Bradley/Rockewell PLC oversees the mash, the wort and the fermentation, including strict temperature control, timing, the opening and closing of various valves and periodic blasts of steam. Up several notches in scale, at the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico, Calif., owner and founder Ken Grossman emphasizes the need for temperature control throughout the brewing pro- cess. That includes precision control, within a degree or two of tolerance, of the hot water that first hits the malted grain—a process called "striking"—and further along, propylene glycol jackets to keep temperatures for top fermentations (ales) and bottom fermentations (lagers) at their respective targets. Flow meters get plenty of use, and Sierra Nevada has installed some of Al Worley's optek optical analyzers to monitor yeast discharge, spotting exactly when the spent yeast sludge has all been flushed and nice, then clean beer starts going through the line. (Fun Beer Fact No. 2: What winemakers call lees, brewers call trub.) All of these facilities seem almost old-fashioned in comparison with the BRAUMAT system developed by Siemens, which pretty much offers mash-to-bottle management. Here's the Siemens web- site on the BRAUMAT Compact, designed for craft breweries: "BRAUMAT Compact is a user-configurable process-control system that provides you with everything you need for the au- tomation, monitoring and control of your entire brewery. Based on Siemens' BRAUMAT package, combined with the automation technology of the SIMATIC PCS 7 platform, BRAUMAT Com- pact is unique because the system offers you the same process con- trol capabilities that are offered to large breweries. This enables you to run your brewery with more precision. It also provides you with the recipe management and scheduling capability needed to help you increase your barrel count without compromising qual- ity. The system offers more capabilities for helping you increase efficiency, boost production and eliminate variability than what is found in other types of systems. Capabilities like scheduling, archiving, reporting and trending functions come standard with the system, which also includes engineering software, the operator interface, controller and input/output modules for connecting to your installed instruments, pumps and valves." If that's the pitch for the Compact model, Brewmation in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., specializes in the sub-compact: auto- mated systems for homebrewers and nanobrewers, the even small- er cousins of microbrewers. Brewmation's systems are sized from one-half barrel to three barrels, are all electric and come with a programmable touch screen PLC control panel that can stay on top of everything in the mash, sparging, boiling the wort and de- livering the goods to the fermentor. Peristaltic pumps keep the water level in the mash just right during extraction. Homebrewers will, alas, have to physically add their own hops. 52 Wines & Vines sePTeMBeR 2011