Observation and control of the beer fermentation using cognitive methods

The improvement of the observability and the development of a method for an active process-control of the beer fermentation process were main goals of this work. Current offline measurement methods in breweries were substituted by online measurement and modelling methods. Especially the online determination of diacetyl, a biochemical key compound during the fermentation process, using an artificial neural network-model (“Cognitive Estimator”), entailed a great improvement of the process-observability. Applying the “Cognitive Estimator for diacetyl” in practice, postulated accuracies of the online determination were reached during the whole fermentation process. A fuzzy-logic expert-system specified the actual state of the fermentation based on the delivered online information. A potential for a reduction of fermentation time up to 25% was exposed in practice by the process control module which is based on an automated change between the detected fermentation states.