Making beer is a complicated process. Although it only consists of malt, yeast, hops and water, it takes a lot of skill, experience and craftsmanship to get the brewing process right and produce a good beer. At Howard Town Brewery in Glossop outside Manchester, this process is perfected with great attention to detail. That is why they are using the eWON Netbiter Remote Management solution which allows the brewing process to be monitored 24/7.

The Netbiter Remote Management solution is a part of a state-of-the art automation system put together by system integrator Insight Control Solutions on behalf of Howard Town Brewery. 

Insight Control Solutions Ltd. designs, builds and installs control systems across the UK and have become experts in control systems, especially for chillers.

“But we deal with everything that needs controlling,” says Bob Haynes, Director at Insight Control Solutions. “As long as you can measure it, we can control it,” he says with a laugh.

Quickly realized the business potential 

Insight Control Solutions first got in contact with Netbiter through their supplier of Crouzet PLCs. These PLCs are very well-suited for connecting to Netbiter for remote monitoring and control.

“We tried out Netbiter for a little while and quickly realized the business potential in offering this service to our clients,” says Bob Haynes. “As long as a device uses Modbus, we can connect it to Netbiter and monitor and control it remotely.”

How it works 

In the brewery in Glossop, Bob Haynes has set up a control system which controls the brewing process. A Netbiter gateway connects to the Crouzet PLC which controls the system.

The Netbiter gateway sends data via Ethernet, or the cellular network, to the cloud-based Netbiter Argos service where it is stored and accessed.

Insight Control Solutions and Howard Town Brewery can log in to the web page www.netbiter.net to see the status of their brewing tanks, chillers, water levels and temperatures and make sure everything is OK.

If values reach certain levels, they can get alarms via a text message or email.

With Netbiter, the brewery can have full control over the fermentation process without having to be constantly on site 24/7. This not only ensures the high quality of the beer, it also frees resources to work with other things.

Using the Netbiter on other systems, it is even possible to start and stop equipment and make adjustments to set points and other parameters, all from the Argos dashboard.

Furthermore, the option to produce reports via email and get online trend graphs measuring performance over time, makes Netbiter very useful for optimising machinery and raw materials handling.

A versatile solution

“Remote Management is extremely useful to both us and our customers,” says Bob Haynes. “And Netbiter is a very good solution to make it happen. With Netbiter, we can offer our customers online access to their equipment which is useful for any modern operation. We have installed Netbiter in applications ranging from hotels, flood pump systems, art storage warehouses and even a cigar humidor containing cigars worth millions of pounds. Netbiter is simply a very good product.” 

In the brewery control panel (left), it is possible to see all current values in the system. A Netbiter gateway is connected to this control panel and sends data to the Netbiter cloud service which can be accessed at www.netbiter.net (right). Here, the users can see the same thing online as the can in the real panel. The brewery can also control the equipment and get alarms if a value reaches a certain level.