Founded in 2013, Sugar Creek Brewing crafts Belgian-inspired ales for North Carolina and beyond. The company is veteran-owned and a certified independent member of the Craft Brewers Association. It has integrated AI and IoT into its brewing process to improve manufacturing and the quality of its beer.
"We hosted IBM at our facility for a training event, and they were discussing some work they had been doing with some other companies. When we learned about how they were using visual inspection to determine if certain products were good or bad, we wondered if they could do the same thing for beer," Vogelbacher says.
Sugar Creek Brewing had a significant problem as it packaged the finished beer into bottles. The fill levels were not consistent, and in some packaging runs, they ended up with excessive foaming. The foaming translated to waste and excessive dissolved oxygen in the beer. Too much oxygen in the beer ruins the quality of the flavor and reduces the shelf life. The spillage problem cost them $30,000 per month.
"We presented this problem to the engineers at IBM, and they installed a camera, which takes pictures of our beer as it exits the bottle line. This picture when combined with other data we collect during bottling operations then gets uploaded to the IBM cloud and interpreted by the Watson algorithms. Our brewers provide some specific criteria, which they find useful, and Watson looks for that needle in a haystack of data. Quick interpretation of large amounts of data has turned our company from being reactive in many circumstances to proactive and able to better pinpoint process improvements. This translates to a better quality product in our customer’s hands, which has always been our mission since day one," Vogelbacher shares.
As one of the older breweries in Charlotte, Sugar Creek Brewing operates some historical equipment as well. When they started this project, one of the first things they did was to install some precision sensors at various points in the brewing process. These sensors collect data 24 hours per day about the brewing operations.
"If you look at any of the sensor’s data in isolation, it doesn’t really tell you a whole lot. The magic occurs when you feed all the data into one spot. We now have a digital dashboard that gives our brewers a near-instantaneous read on the health of our product and production facility. Previously we were generating dozens of binders of handwritten data and reading many gauges via plain eyesight. We now have consistent and calibrated data with our most critical data being stored in a secure location on IBM's cloud, accessible from any device with a secure network connection," Vogelbacher explains.
Sugar Creek Brewing plans to be the first brewer in the world to collaborate fully with AI to create a beer from scratch. It plans to name the beer IPAi. The company also wants to connect the manufacturing data with the huge stream of consumer-focused qualitative data that is being generated via beer social media sites.
"Times are changing fast, and an average local brewery could easily have more than 50,000 reviews of their products online and accessible by the public. My goal is to mine this data for qualitative feedback on our product and others and integrate it with our manufacturing data to make an artisanal craft beer using AI as the brewmaster. Eventually, our brewers will see AI as a tool to enhance their artistry. Just like an artist takes a hand-drawn sketch and uses a computer to digitize it into a stunning animation," Vogelbacher says.
The implementation of AI and IoT saved Sugar Creek Brewing $10,000 per month by figuring out the foaming problem. Vogelbacher believes it is making the business more healthy, which ends up preserving and improving the jobs of existing employees, and he does not see AI replacing staff. In addition, the quality of the product is getting better, which means more sales: More sales results in more personnel joining the team and a bigger company.
(Forbes)
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