Spinning the WEB at Moosehead

Moosehead Breweries Ltd., which prides itself on quality and tradition - a motto also found on the labels gracing its suds - is unquestionably one of the leaders in the would of Canadian beer making. A big reason why is because the family-owned, Saint John, N.B.-based brewer also happens to be right on the cutting edge of automation technology.

Company owners, the Oland family, began brewing back in 1867, and today product lines range from traditional ales to contemporary light beers. At its Saint John brewery, Moosehead runs a plant with capacity of 1.2 million hectoliters on round-the-clock brewhouse shifts. It also has two eight-hour packaging shifts.

The brewery invested in a sophisticated automated control system in 1989 when it was experiencing difficulty controlling the temperatures in it's cellars, where the beer is aged. As one tank was being cleaned with hot caustic, for example, it would course a rise in temperature in the tank nest to it, which contained aging beer.

These great variances in temperature were making the process area too hot, and Moosehead clearly needed a system to improve the control and sequencing of the cellar cooling units.

Local Help

Consequently, Moosehead turned to a fellow Eastern Canadian Company for help. Trihedral Engineering Ltd. of Bedford, N.S., prescribed its WEB operator interface software as a solution. The growing automated systems supplier also has other food and beverage clients - including New Annan, P.E.I.-based potato processor Cavendish Farms - as well as other big-name customers such as Kodak Canada.

Moosehead's key criteria for selecting and implementing he software was that it could not involve any retraining of company operators, or any PLC (programmable logic control) reprogramming.

Trihedral says it achieved these objectives by "mimicking" Moosehead's existing operator interface, including reproducing an old-style membrane keypad directly on the screen. Operators were then able to manipulate the on-screen keypad using a mouse, with only a minimal learning curve.

Moosehead was so impressed with its success in controlling the cellar temperatures with its new automated system, that it proceeded to install the WEB software in its brewing department to replace older operator interfaces there. The software application has since been expanded into the engineering, carbonating, fermenting and packing areas of the company, for both monitoring and control applications.

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