Streamlining brewery operations to drive rapid expansion

04 May 2018

Automation solutions have improved efficiency of process control which has allowed Deschutes to increase production volume while maintaining consistent quality.

Continue reading this article

Register now for free and access every article and to register for the print edition.

For more than a decade, US-based craft brewer, Deschutes, has leveraged Emerson hardware, software and services to help it streamline automation, which has made its production expansion from 100,000 to more than 300,000 barrels annually a simpler task. This growth will continue at a new facility being developed by the company.

An automation solution was needed that would allow increased production without distracting focus from producing high quality beers. Advanced automation solutions from Emerson originally helped Deschutes reduce malt delivery time by 24%, providing the potential for an additional 450 barrels daily.

Explaining more about the company’s automation journey, Brian Faivre, brewmaster of operations at Deschutes, said: “We love making beer, but as the brewery grew, so did our need to automate to allow the brewmasters to concentrate on brewing. Emerson’s understanding of our automation system hardware and organisational goals helped us find solutions to keep pace with rapidly increasing demand for our craft beers. Better visibility into process control strategy has allowed us to refine our processes to produce consistent quality beer, helping us quickly become a leader in the craft brewing industry.”

Deschutes adopted Emerson’s DeltaV standard configuration library, delivering control modules that are preconfigured to operate with standard software structure across a variety of basic operating facilities. This helped streamline process control and Human Centered Design principles to bring the most important and relevant information to operators’ eyes, speeding decisions to ensure optimal batch quality and efficiency. In addition, Emerson’s Rosemount instrumentation feeds the DeltaV system level, temperature and flow information to ensure optimal batch quality.

To facilitate continued expansion and improvement, Deschutes is now set to upgrade to the latest available release of Emerson’s DeltaV distributed control system. The upgrade will provide more efficient controller loading, improving performance as Deschutes adds another fermentation cellar to its Bend, Oregon facility in late 2018.

For more information on Emerson technologies for brewers, visit www.Emerson.com/Brewing.