Collaboration with Dru Bru utilizes real-time data to brew more consistent beer.

Dru Bru and A-Bay Engineers kicked off a pilot program in February 2021.? Dru Bru is a brewery located in Snoqualmie Pass & Cle Elum, WA.? They work, live and play in the mountains and have been doing so for over 7 years.? The team at A-Bay has this same love for the mountains and great beer, so that made this a great partnership.??

While providing an initial overview of operations at Dru Bru, owner Dru noted “we struggle to effectively use our historical data we’ve been compiling for years.”? He envisioned a day that they could use this data to improve brewday performance and consistency.? A-Bay observed their struggle to connect data from brewdays to fermentation data as well.? Oftentimes data entry errors were found due to a lack of checks and balances within their data management process.? With production reaching capacity at Dru Bru’s flagship location, the time was ripe to streamline and improve data effectiveness to optimize brewery operations.

Teaming up with Dru and his wonderful team, A-Bay got to work with weekly meetings to align on their existing processes and procedures.? Understanding how Dru Bru collected and utilized data along their brewing process was an essential first step.? A-Bay started building out tools that would enable Dru Bru to utilize historical data quickly and efficiently.? The restructuring and combining multiple databases allowed the data to be more accessible.? As a team, it was determined that data entry was a weak spot and a better way to enter the data was prioritized. A-Bay built an app to improve data entry for both brewday and fermentation data, while increasing quality control of the data.?

Through this collaborative approach, A-Bay continues to develop customized tools for Dru Bru to better suit their needs.? These tools include dashboards with overviews of brewday performance, toolkits for mash, boil, & yeast, exception reports, comparisons of batch specific data vs beer averages vs targets and exception reporting.? All together, A-Bay has developed an automated system for data entry and utilization, building transparency up and down Dru Bru’s organization. All said and done, Dru Bru now has a system that will allow future brewers to continue to make their delicious mountain made beer consistently and efficiently.??

Improvements include the following:

• Created a single entry point app to compile all brew day data, compared to 11 different spreadsheets used previously.
• App removed the need for paper log sheets during the brewing process (still used for backup) reducing the risk of transposition and interpretation errors.
• Developed quality control measures to highlight outliers and reduce entry errors using visualizations within the dashboards, exception reporting, and upper / lower limits on metric inputs.??

Brewday & Fermentation Data Real Time Uses

• Grain temperature vs historical mash temperature analysis to ensure the mash temperature on each batch is achieved.
• Current vs historical mash and pre-boil gravity analysis to ensure each batch finishes in spec.?
• Brewhouse Efficiency and volume yield analysis to maximize grain to sugar output, and optimize yield resulting in significant raw material cost saving.
• Real time fermentation analysis including warnings if fermentation performance is outside of acceptable limits