Modern control keeps brewery steeped in tradition
15 Jan 2000
Beer drinkers may despair, lager drinkers may not care, but the Greene King brewery in Bury St Edmonds is one of the few left in the country to brew ale using traditional methods.
Copper mash tuns dating back to 1938 and the special Greene King yeast are both seen as fundamental to the famous taste of Abbot Ale and Greene King IPA. And the yeast in particular played a crucial role when the decision was taken to expand the brewery. Any new system had to ensure that the yeast would not become contaminated by different strains.
Control of the brewery was based around 10-year-old Omron PLCs and it was decided by systems integrator Briggs Automation, in conjunction with Greene King's project engineer Neil Flint, to upgrade these and link the control into a proprietary SCADA system. A key factor in smoothing the transition from the old to the new system was the backwards compatibility of both the hardware and software of the Omron PLCs. `Rather than a new control program having to be written from scratch,' says Flint, `the existing program for the 10-year-old C1000 could be copied straight across to the new CVM1 model, with just a few modifications'.
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