At the Rhinegeist Brewery in Ohio, software plays a critical role in the brewing process. The brewery uses automation software for their fully automated brew house, ensuring consistent beer quality and efficient production. It also employs Grist for analytics, which helps manage data points and flag issues in the brewery, aiding in change management.
Nick Brehm, the head brewer, spoke with ProBrewer contributor John Holl on the importance of user-friendly interfaces for staff training and the challenges of manual data input. Brehm says the brewery recently transitioned to a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, a lengthy process that involves extensive vetting and internal discussions. He notes that budget considerations and economic value are crucial in adopting new software, with smaller, low-risk subscriptions often being more feasible than large, one-time investments.
John Holl: How important is software when it comes to your brewery?
Nick Brehm: We have a fully automated BrauKon brew house, and so it has its own automation software that controls the brew house and allows us to brew at the pace that we need to brew. And with that software comes a lot of programming that needs to happen to make sure that recipes are consistent, and what we are intending to do in the brewhouse happens.
Along with that, we have a lot of automation throughout the brewery, and each one of those has its own software that runs each piece of equipment, and then the interaction between those different pieces of equipment, and the troubleshooting of each piece of equipment and the training of brewers on each pieces of those equipment, and it all kind of hinges on the user interface of that piece of software and the ability for our staff automation engineer to make changes or not to that software, and our ability to work within the constant the kind of constraints of the given piece of equipment software.
John Holl: There’s a lot of other brewers out there who still have manual systems, who don’t have the layout that you do, and I imagine you’ve worked on those in the past. What does the addition of software mean for beer? What does it mean for the beer that you make?
Nick Brehm: It means we can make beer at the scale that we need to. We’re making 120,000 barrels this year, and to do that manually, with consistency and quality, would be a challenge. So, the automation and the software that goes along with that allows for remarkable consistency, turn by turn through the brew house, and the ability to train folks quickly to produce high quality and consistent beer through the brew house. I would say that’s the most meaningful part of it.
John Holl: What about innovation. Can software help with that?
Nick Brehm: We have a pilot brew house, a 10-HLl system that has a small amount of automation to it, but it’s mostly manual. As far as innovating and translating pilot batch to the large scale, there is some benefit there, because when you innovate a recipe on a smaller manual system with a brewer or two that is very in touch with that system. That scaling can happen with high confidence. I know that the language of that translation from the one or two individuals brewing on the pilot system to how to correctly write that recipe on the automated system, so that I can have 12 to 15 other people brew that recipe perfectly every time.
John Holl: What else are you using?
Nick Brehm: We use Grist, which does analytics for all our brew house and seller data. It allows us to capture all our key data points and flags when we have incursions outside oof our control limits and it can pretty easily give us some analytical reports to show how we’re trending over time.
John Holl: What about staff training?
Nick Brehm: Staff training is constantly a challenge, but something that is super important. I would say the easier the user interface of a given software is the easier it is to train somebody on it.
That’s something that value in new software. Is it easy for people to interact with, and is it easy to understand? And is it intuitive? I think that having a champion of a given software is a useful and kind of critical aspect of training. It doesn’t necessarily have to be me or the manager. If there’s an individual that’s a key user that can get trained at a high level, at an early stage, it’s a lot easier for them to disseminate the information to the people using it.
John Holl: When you start thinking about the need for implementing a new software for the brewery, what is the process like for the brewery?
Nick Brehm: I think it comes down to this size of the project. I think our ERP transition was a major change for the business, and so that had a very long-time frame of vetting. We had a team of people looking at all the options available, vetting each option for its pros and cons, and over the course of many months, laying out a presentation and a buffet of options, all of which had big upsides, big downsides. We had to have conversations internally for many months among our leadership team and our board to figure out what the best direction was for the company.
We did at least six months of prep work within the company to figure out who’s going to be the leader of that project, who’s going to manage it, who’s going to go out and do trainings off site with this company ahead of time. Then we had to ask how those people are going to come back and disseminate that information on their teams. That was a fairly large and long, and a drawn-out process.
John Holl: And you’re also thinking about budgets both immediate and long-term too, right?
Absolutely. With any new software we must assess it on the economic value of it. For instance, for Grist, does the cost outweigh the amount of time folks are investing in doing this work already? And could those people, when they don’t have to do this work already, be better utilized within the brewery? And that was an easy one to see that this would be a net positive economically and for our focus within the brewery to be able to free people’s energy up to do other things. But for bigger, bigger projects that have a bigger price tag and have maybe a little bit more intangible aspects to them that factors in.