Community Beer Company in Dallas, TX is known for growing their own yeast in-house and for their top-notch equipment. They claim to have invested in the finest, most sophisticated brewing and packaging equipment made. This also meant that they focused on the best components as well—including encoders.

Beer Making Process

Part of beer-making involves mashing, where grains move through the mill, into the grist hopper, and are transferred via flex auger to the mash tun. Hot water is added at specific temperatures to convert the starches in the barley into simple sugars. 

Then there's lautering, which takes place in the lauter tun. It’s in this vessel where precise motion is needed to get the taste of the beer just right. The lautering process is where the liquid solution known as “wort” is separated from the solid grains, forming the foundation for the beer's flavor. The wort is then pumped into the boil kettle where the hops are added, contributing to the bitterness, flavor, and aroma of the finished product. From there, the liquid gets ready for fermentation, the final stage of the brewing process before bottling.

Automating the Process

Automating beer-making improves production efficiency and the quality of the beer, particularly during the lautering stage. Inside the lauter tun, a motorized rake gently breaks up the grain bed, allowing for the highest quality wort to be extracted. The grains are sprayed with hot water during this phase to recover all of the remaining sugars. 

On top of the lauter tun is the motor and gearbox which drive the screw jack, raising and lowering the rake inside as the liquid level changes. Community Beer found it challenging to properly position the rake inside the lauter tun, resulting in poor sweeping of the grains, slowing wort extraction, and inhibiting the entire brewing process. 

The team decided that they needed a reliable shaft encoder. Final specifications indicated that the encoder would need a quarter-inch shaft size, positive pulse polarity, and a resolution of 200 CPR. The interconnection would use a 6-pin MS connector. After some research, Community Beer reached out to Encoder Products Company (EPC) to help them better control the motion of the screw jack and rake inside the vessel. Working with EPC, Community Beer selected the company’s Model 716 Accu-Coder® encoder as their solution. The Model 716 is ideally suited for applications requiring a quadrature output. Designed for compatibility with most programmable controllers, electronic counters, motion controllers, and motor drives. The encoder comes in five versatile housing styles, quadrature output, and resolutions available up to 10,000 CPR

It was discovered that putting the Model 716 on the gearbox driving the screw jack, was the best way to correctly raise and lower the rake inside the lauter tun, loosening the grains and effectively extracting the wort. With such a precise process, reliable motion feedback is a must to ensure the equipment functions efficiently so that each batch performs exactly as the brew master requires. After installation, Community Beer found that they had eliminating the bottleneck in the lauter tun.

For information: 

Encoder Products Company

Model 716 Accu-Coder

Community Beer Company

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