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Beer AI Technology

Budweiser, the World's Largest Beer Maker, is Using Low-Cost Sensors and Machine Learning To Keep Beverages Flowing (wsj.com) 80

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The world's largest beer maker is using low-cost sensors and machine learning to predict when motors at a Fort Collins, Colo. brewery might malfunction. From a report: The Anheuser-Busch InBev SA plant was the first among the company's 350 beverage-making facilities to test whether wireless sensors that can detect ultrasonic sounds -- beyond the grasp of the human ear -- can be analyzed to predict when machines need maintenance. "You can start hearing days in advance that something will go wrong, and you'll know within hours when it'll fail. It's really, for us, very practical," said Tassilo Festetics, vice president of global solutions for the company.

The project began about six months ago when Mr. Festetics's team installed 20 wireless sensors across three packaging lines motors to measure vibrations. The sounds picked up are transmitted in real time and then compared to a normal, functioning engine's sounds, which serve as a baseline and allow the program to identify anomalies. A key advantage is that the sensors are non-invasive and don't need to be placed inside a machine. Sensors have been used for predictive maintenance in the past, but they were unable to transmit information in real time. Advances in processing data at the edge of the network, referred to as edge computing, enables companies to collect and analyze real-time sensor data from machines.
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Budweiser, the World's Largest Beer Maker, is Using Low-Cost Sensors and Machine Learning To Keep Beverages Flowing More

Budweiser, the World's Largest Beer Maker, is Using Low-Cost Sensors and Machine Learning To Keep Beverages Flowing

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  • I never liked beer until I was in my 30s when the Craft Beer started to be commonly available in the States. Then I realized what I was tasting before was just crap.
    Before when offered a beer I would just politely refuse.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      (From the article) You can start hearing days in advance that something will go wrong

      Translation: They're starting to run out of piss.

    • Oddly I've had the opposite experience. As I get older I hate all the bitter or hoppiness that tends to be the trademark of craft beers. The "weaker" beers are better (granted something like Spotted Cow and German beers like Hacker Pschorr are better than Bud).

      Granted I've fallen in love with sour beers, but they tend to be high on the pricey list, so are only an occasional treat.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        Granted I've fallen in love with sour beers, but they tend to be high on the pricey list, so are only an occasional treat.

        Seems like you're actually a wine drinker.

        • Re:To bad they don't make good beer. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Friday January 25, 2019 @01:40PM (#58021994)

          Or he just likes beers that don't fit into what the trendy crowd says is "proper".

          I can't stand hoppy beer. I enjoy beer just fine but I literally research the IBU and basically won't touch anything over 15-ish (generally the lower the better for me). That doesn't mean I don't like beer - just that I don't like the same beer as you.

          Shiner Bock, Snapshot Wheat, or yes, even Bud Light, taste fine to me.

          • Shiner Bock, Snapshot Wheat, or yes, even Bud Light, taste fine to me.

            Shiner used to have a purpose back when it was cheap, because it came on cans. So if you were going toobin' on the Guadalupe (locally, "gwa duh loop") river, you could take it with you. It's also much more expensive outside of Texas than inside, which I've been told is about taxation, but I don't actually know if that's true and don't care enough to look it up :)

            Bud Light also has a purpose; on sale, it's cheaper than bottled water. You can substitute it for many purposes, in a pinch. Actual Budweiser, on t

            • Shiner Bock used to be a good beer, back when it was locally made. You couldn't find it 100 miles outside of Shiner, TX. They didn't even have it in Houston. Then they got bought out by corporate, the new owners changed the formula, and hipsters invaded and ruined Austin.

              You know, when I lived in Austin, we never had "keep Austin weird" bumper stickers. You know why? We didn't need 'em.

              • You know, when I lived in Austin, we never had "keep Austin weird" bumper stickers. You know why? We didn't need 'em.

                Time waits for no one. Just be glad Texas has shitty weather, or Austin would be 100% Californian by now. Well, it's floodin' down in Texas...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mjwx ( 966435 )

            Or he just likes beers that don't fit into what the trendy crowd says is "proper".

            I can't stand hoppy beer. I enjoy beer just fine but I literally research the IBU and basically won't touch anything over 15-ish (generally the lower the better for me). That doesn't mean I don't like beer - just that I don't like the same beer as you.

            Shiner Bock, Snapshot Wheat, or yes, even Bud Light, taste fine to me.

            You do know that beer has other flavours than "hops" right?

            Quite a few of the beers I favour are malty (Doom Bar) or even sweet as there are quite a few fruit infused beers here in the UK.

            I think IPA's are over-rated and drunk by people who don't really know anything about beer and are just trying to be fashionable. I much prefer an amber ale or an American session ale (both similar styles). German Pilsners have the bitterness, but not the hop flavour.

            The problem with most places is that you only b

        • Seems like you're actually a wine drinker.

          I do like the occasional box-o-wine, but I wouldn't put sour beers and wine in the same category. Sour beers take the bitterness out of beer.

  • I am not familiar with the term edge computing. After a brief 2 Google searches, I'm skeptical this is isn't just a buzzword. Can anyone elaborate?
    • Whoops, forgot what even started this.
      Sensors have been used for predictive maintenance in the past, but they were unable to transmit information in real time. Advances in processing data at the edge of the network, referred to as edge computing, enables companies to collect and analyze real-time sensor data from machines.

      The last 2 sentences imply that data processed not at the "edge" of a network means it can't be transmitted in real time. Fact or fiction?

      • Sounds like they ran an Ethernet cable to the motor data logger. Such edge, much paradigm.

        Roll dice to determine odds of Internet breach shutting down the line.

    • Perhaps it has something to do with twizzling the flurm? [dilbert.com]

    • "I am not familiar with the term edge computing.

      That's all the people who use Edge as browser.

      Both of them.

  • It's nice to control processes to turn out a consistent product. Well, unless it's Budweiser or Miller beer.
    I often enjoy a local brewery that's been in business for over 140 years, (with the exception of prohibition years) and their prices are better, and their beer (not to mention Octoberfest and bock beers) are so much better than the "Major" Breweries like BW and Miller. Especially on tap, much less in cans and bottles.

  • Alert! Alert! (Score:5, Funny)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Friday January 25, 2019 @01:09PM (#58021714)
    The AE-35 dispensing unit is going to fail, Dave. You should go down to the factory floor and replace it before failure which would cause a large beer spill. I'll shut down the line for you Dave. It's perfectly safe.
  • This is interesting since its approach can be deployed in legacy equipment that doesn't have 'smart' sensors in it or deployed across shop floors that might have various pieces of equipment that don't 'talk' to each other or a centralized monitoring point. I work for such a place that has dozens of decades-old equipment that could benefit from such an approach. It is just too bad that Budweiser is spending all their money on cool manufacturing approaches and not on producing a drinkable beer!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 )
      Budweiser is like Coke, they can't just change the flavor, no matter how much better they think they can make it.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Most of those things already start making horrible noises well before they fail.

      • Are the noises louder than the stereo?

        It's not insane to put sensors on things you know are going to be ignored by your target market. Why BMWs have electric low brake pad sensors (for many decades now). They talk about 'driving machine' but know their typical driver isn't paying enough attention to notice brake squealers.

    • Never. Because the shift to electric cars is going to make all of those things go away.

    • They've been in valuable machines with a high cost of failure for decades. Thing is, dspite what most people seem to think, cars are cheap bits of commodity crap and if they fail they don't cost anything much by not working.

      Get up to a 10MW gen-set in a vessel which clocks $10,000/hour of down time with several hundred personnel idle while the machine is idle ... and miraculously vibration sensors (which they're describing as "ultrasonic sensors" ; meh) start sprouting from major shafts, in the sides of be

  • A couple of microphones and a computer that compares soundbites is now "edge computing" and "machine learning."
    • buzzword or not. These kinds of things are a sort of silent increase in efficiency that nobody's talking about. It's much quicker and cheaper to do the maintenance than it is to clean up a mess, but only if you know when to do the maintenance. Otherwise you're stuck spending a fortune on unnecessary maintenance.

      This is literally an answer to the old Dilbert joke "I want advanced notice of any unplanned outages, and I want it yesterday". That sounded funny in the 90s, in 2019 somebody did it.

      What wor

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      Edge computing means that the signal from the sensors will be processed at the point where they are generated and not sent raw to a central processing server. It has nothing to do with "cutting edge", but with the place in the network where the computing happens (at the edge).

  • Noise analysis of machines is neither new nor particularly exciting, and neither are wireless microphones.

  • Bud Miller and Coors low flavor beers have a place in the market too. They are OK served cold on a hot day. There are plenty of craft beers here near San Diego but many people can't afford or don't want to pay twelve or fifteen dollars for a six-pack.

  • In my day (submarines, 80's) it was a periodic check rather than real time (and definitely not wireless;-) ) It was considered valuable, because it really worked.

    Motors, etc, all had little shiny disks glued on for the magnetic pickups; the sound guys got recordings and compared with previous ones (on paper.) They were working on a way to do it with reciprocating machines like compressors and maybe even diesels, which is probably possible now.

    • Before that, it was the experienced people that knew what the machine was supposed to sound like. Some places paid attention.

  • My very first job after graduating in 1981 was in acoustic emission, using ultrasound detectors (piezo-electric transducers) working in the 100 kHz to 2 MHz region to detect cracking in steel structures, at this point this technology was in regular NDT use, i.e. to verify lifting platforms, and people were starting to use them on rotating machinery.

    It must be the use of machine learning to try to recognize the failure patterns which is the only thing new here.

    Terje

    • As I posted, I saw systems doing this 30 years ago. Not machine learning, but fairly straightforward analysis.

  • I mean this is a currently in development product by one of the largest and most common process control equipment manufacturers in the world. We've been trialing this with Emerson for 2 years already. It's quite a solid theory too: Build a signature of what your plant sound likes, detect changes to that signature and use wireless devices to triangulate.

    I didn't realise that this has as much impact at a brewery but in hazardous industries the theory is solid: We've spent the past 20 years reducing the number

    • Vibration monitoring is hardly new. But yeah, your point about de-humanning the workfloor meaning fewer ears makes sense in needing to retrofit this to complex production lines. Obviously, newer process equipment would have built-in, and almost certainly hard-wired, sensors throughout, It's relatively cheap at build time.

      • Vibration monitoring is hardly new.

        Who said anything about vibration?

        Obviously, newer process equipment would have built-in, and almost certainly hard-wired, sensors throughout, It's relatively cheap at build time.

        Actually that's not at all obvious. During any project, cost optimisation usually throws out anything that could be used for condition based monitoring or fine process optimisation first (for non critical equipment that is), and that is precisely where this comes in. Incidents don't typically happen on critical equipment, they happen on the unmonitored forgotten stuff. They happen on that small crappy handvalve that is slightly open and cavitating. They happen on that reall

  • Tassilo Festetics. It just rolls right off the tongue. Might be, I dunno, a brand name for stripper supplies or something.

  • Let's face it: American beer is the worst in the world. Like its chocolate - amazing that Americans are happy to eat Hershey's, which smells of puke.

  • I wrote an App for a company here in NZ [sagitto.com] which uses miniaturised Near InfraRed (NIR) spectroscopy to analyse and determine desired characteristics of organic and non-organic materials.
    The biggest wins they have so far are in what is termed as "bio-prospecting" and one recent big win was in the Australian and NZ hop growers.
    When you pick hops you can scan them using this device and print off a label with the date and the alpha value (bitterness) as well as other things of interest to brewers.
    It gets even more

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