April 2019

30 n FOOD AND BEVERAGE April 2019 www.drivesncontrols.com Control system upgrade triples brewery output S adler’s Ales, based near Stourbridge in the Black Country, has been crafting beers since 1900 and is currently being run by a fifth-generation brewer, its managing director, Chris Sadler. Popular brews in the company’s portfolio take their names from local subjects, such as the Peaky Blinder range which has proved an instant success. The growing demand for Sadler’s beers led to the company expanding its brewhouse, which contains all of the equipment needed for the brewing process. This includes a mill to crush barley grains, a hot water tank, a mash tun to obtain wort and separate it from the mash, a copper to boil the wort while adding ingredients such as hops, a heat exchanger to cool the liquid rapidly, as well as several fermentation tanks and filter systems. “The new facilities should help us to quadruple production,” says Sadler. “Our goal is to produce up to 1,000 barrels a week.” The aim was to create a higher capacity brewing process that could be monitored and controlled more easily. Sadler’s contacted a local firm, Clarke Controls & Distribution, to help achieve this objective. On first inspection, Clarke’s technical team discovered that there was no formal documentation or drawings of the installation, such as piping and instrumentation (P&I) diagrams. To address this, the team suggested analysing the plant to reverse-engineer a new control system. “The absence of any information on the existing control system set-up made the reverse-engineering operations particularly challenging,” recalls Clarke Controls & Distribution’s managing director, Ian Clarke. His engineers produced an accurate P&I diagram, which When an historic Black Country brewery needed to expand, it decided to implement an automated control system for the rst time, thus boosting its productivity and making the quality of its craft beers more consistent. In less than a month, it more than tripled its output. Sadler’s Ales, located near Stourbridge in the Black Country, has been crafting beers since 1900. The growing demand for Sadler’s beers led to the company extending its brewhouse, which was then automated to help boost output and ensure consistent quality