[MUSIC] Welcome to a Digital Manufacturing and Design or DMD Dialogue session. As your moderator, I will take you into companies where we will have conversations with industry partners who share our manufacturing passion. More specifically, they share our passion for how digital manufacturing and design i s transforming the industry. We are extremely fortunate to be able to share some firsthand experiences with you. Today, we're going to visit 12 Gates Brewing Company to see a continuous manufacturing process. Founded in Williamsville, New York, 12 Gates is a production brewery named in the spirit of alchemy. Alchemy is the medieval forerunner of chemistry which attempted to discover the elixir of life. The 12 Gates production process includes milling, oiling, transferring, fermenting, and conclude to packaging. Let's go inside. [MUSIC] >> With the brewing process, 90% of our beer is four main ingredients. It's water, malt, hops and yeast. Each of those, before they arrive or when they arrive will get analysis. Our water we will send out for water analysis. So we see our mineral contents, our pH, our alkalinity, our yeast. We get an initial load of yeast in. And then we will transfer it and grow it for about ten generations for about four months. So we do quality analysis, quality control on the yeast. To make sure they're thriving, they're happy, they're growing, they're reproducing. Our hops and our malts will come in with a full analysis sheet which hits a lot of points that are very specific for brewing. And with those sheets, we're able to input that data into our brewing software to help massage some recipes. If a hop comes in that's a little bit stronger with our oils. We're able to adjust and back down the quantity for what we're looking for specifically from a certain type of hop. The grain is pretty stable. We get it in by the pallet, usually five or six pallets. So we get about 8,000 pounds in at a time. So we get that, it runs pretty consistent. There are some minor changes that will affect brewing that we have to adjust on there. A lot of that information is handled on our software. >> We have a brewing software where the initial recipe is put in there. And it helps our brewers kind of calculate how the beer should turn out. As far as how much alcohol we should expect out of it based on the extraction rate things like that. >> For newer recipes that we're not ready to pull the trigger on 30 barrels, or 930 gallons, we'll brew on our pilot or our test system. That allows us to brew 45 gallons at a time, and we're able to see nuances. Because we can get a lot of quantitative data. But we're dealing with food products. So there's a lot of sensory, a lot of quality control with sensory. So we'll brew it on a pilot system and test it out. See if we like it, see if we might pass on it. And, we'll take those beers, we'll put them on tap up here, and we can treat our tasting room as kind of an R & D department. >> We're actually collecting data and analysis by customers. A little score sheet, how they rate it and some comments and suggestions and what they think. How they like the flavors or the aromas of the particular style of beer that we've made on our pilot system. [MUSIC] >> Some digital, we have a couple of digital instruments for testing our gravities, testing the amount of sugar in there before it's beer. After it's beer then it's manual, the old school hydrometer. So you get a cylinder of the beer, you lower it down in there. And then depending on how high it floats it'll tell you how much residual sugar is still left in there. >> For our hydrometers, which we use to detect sugar, they'll zero or level out at distilled water. So we know distilled water will always be this reading. So we're able to calibrate it that way. Those, because they're glass, they fail because they break. Our digital equipment, it's digital, it's very sensitive and those wear out over time. So we have to watch and a lot of equipment comes with its own calibration setup. So we follow through and recalibrate periodically or as needed. Our pH meter, we calibrate every day before we're brewing. pH meters tend to bounce all over the place. So we calibrate it right before our brew day and right before any process we want to detect. [MUSIC] >> Yeah, quality control is extremely important for any brewery. In my situation more so for us as well because we are such a large brewery. We're one of the biggest in the area. Meaning how much beer we can produce on a brew day, if we mess up a batch that big. It hurts the bottom line even more. because we're dumping beer down the drains if it's not consistent and if those quality control measures aren't in place. So that data is extremely important to make sure that it's the consistent product that's coming out the back door as well. >> Our data, when we're brewing a beer, we have brew sheets. So every bit of information we can glean from the brewing process, we'll write that down. That stays on a piece of paper, stays analog, we're able to input a lot of it into a brewing software and that acts as a backup. We call it a brew day sheet. Whether it's on our pilot system or on our large production system, we have brew day sheets. It gets all the data. That goes with our recipe, which also goes with the cellaring sheet. So after the wort leaves the brew house and goes into a fermenter it's considered cellaring. So we have a separate sheet that we write our volumes, we write our gravities, any nuances. Just a lot of information that carries over from the brew day process goes on that cellaring sheet. And that cellaring sheet will get populated throughout the brewing process or the fermentation process. Those sheets will go from fermentation to conditioning, to our bright tank, to how we're going to package it. So all of that information is stored on that sheet, which a lot of those data points get added into our software. And then, that selling sheet, along with all of our other paperwork from brewing that specific beer, it gets filed away in binders. >> The rest of the testing that goes on during the brew day, during fermentation and cellaring and everything, is all tracked by us. I have sent out some samples of a couple of our beers to a lab that will do the full spectrum analysis of the actual alcohol. The bitterness level, the calories that are in the beer and everything. So there are some external uses as well that I've sent stuff out to that. Will give us some different data, because some of it's theoretical. But then there is some actual lab analysis that can be done to give us the exact numbers
