I am starting to work with a new very small brewery near my house to work on quality checks and process controls.
My background has been in Industrial Engineering, Process Improvement, and I currently work as a Quality Engineer in a different industry.
My understanding of brewing comes a lot from research I've done during my time as a homebrewer.
When looking up quality I of course only see people talking about microbial lab work and sensory analysis. These of course will be implemented in the brewery. Just needing to reallocate room.
But from my background I'm sure there is a lot more process controls that can be put in place to create consistency in the wort going into the fermenters... But I can't find any real discussion or articles about actual process controls.
Does anyone have any advice on where to look into the processes for control either using something like SPC or important in process QC checkpoints.
I was thinking of the milling process because I know that unevenly crushed malt can affect the extraction from the grains so I was thinking that Statistical Process Control (SPC) on the milling machine may be helpful to identify when the process is starting to go out to know to either adjust the gap or do other maintenance.
I have found some studies where SPC control charts were used for tracking IBUs over many batches for big breweries. I don't think that would help here though.
My background has been in Industrial Engineering, Process Improvement, and I currently work as a Quality Engineer in a different industry.
My understanding of brewing comes a lot from research I've done during my time as a homebrewer.
When looking up quality I of course only see people talking about microbial lab work and sensory analysis. These of course will be implemented in the brewery. Just needing to reallocate room.
But from my background I'm sure there is a lot more process controls that can be put in place to create consistency in the wort going into the fermenters... But I can't find any real discussion or articles about actual process controls.
Does anyone have any advice on where to look into the processes for control either using something like SPC or important in process QC checkpoints.
I was thinking of the milling process because I know that unevenly crushed malt can affect the extraction from the grains so I was thinking that Statistical Process Control (SPC) on the milling machine may be helpful to identify when the process is starting to go out to know to either adjust the gap or do other maintenance.
I have found some studies where SPC control charts were used for tracking IBUs over many batches for big breweries. I don't think that would help here though.
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