Online Identification of Beer Fermentation Phases

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the craft beer industry has significantly developed with the emergence of thousands of microbreweries all over the world. These are mostly small companies that cannot afford the cost of the process monitoring systems that are usually embedded in the machinery used by industrial breweries, but they need to monitor and control the production process in order to guarantee a constant quality of beer. The development of low-cost systems for monitoring the production process would help microbreweries obtain the desired product quality consistency. In this paper, the authors propose a low-cost system for the real-time identification of the different phases of the alcoholic fermentation of beer. The first results prove the ability of the proposed system to monitor the fermentation and to detect anomalies in the process promptly.