Will U.S. craft beer momentum continue?

When you’re on a roll you might as well roll, because it’s not going to last forever. You certainly don’t stop and take a picture. What a banal truism if ever there was one. But it captures well what’s happening in the U.S. right now. Ever since the controversial debate over “craft versus crafty” beers was kicked off last December, there has been a lot of beard-scratching and soul-searching by industry pundits, cranks and smarty pants over concerns that eventually the segment’s growth will reach the glass ceiling. The jury is still out if, or when, this will happen. Meanwhile, an always confident Charlie Papazian anticipates that by 2017 craft beers will have a 10 percent market share and at this point the momentum will take them past that.

Turning ideas into real beers

The main objective of the marketing departments of all companies is to increase sales and acquire market shares. Breweries are no exception to the rule. Acquiring market shares most often happens through launching new brands aiming to attract new customers who did not find existing brands appealing. It is not always easy to manage the development and launch of new beers. Indeed, the production of a new beer may involve the use of different raw materials, a change in the brewing temperature diagram, different kinds of yeast or a different fermentation diagram. Managing all of these parameters can turn into a nightmare for the brewer and cause a halt in the development of new beers.

Business strategies in the beverage market

For decades, the German beverage industry has been seriously affected by the stagnating demand for beverages, by over-capacities and by the resulting crowding-out and price competition. This situation requires integrated and complex strategies for handling both market and company, the objective being to create a clear profile for the enterprise. Such objectives should take into account the following factors: competitors and off-trade companies as key market drivers, the consumer target group and sales intermediaries as brand-relevant factors and lastly, internal and external resources as essential features for the creation and further development of a sustainable competitive advantage.

Customized automation concepts for breweries

Automation of brewing systems has advanced quite rapidly, and new innovations are constantly improving automation concepts. Kaspar Schulz provides experience-based solutions, where the user – not the system – is the nexus of development. Also, upgrading existing systems with modern components is no longer a matter of long downtimes.

Open heart surgery successful

The work accomplished by ProLeiT on behalf of Colombia’s Bavaria brewery can be best compared with open heart surgery on a top athlete performing under stress on an ergometer during the intervention. ProLeiT has successfully managed to gradually upgrade this large brewery with an annual production of around 11 million hectoliters, which is currently undergoing a capacity expansion, to the brewmaxx V8 process control system. This modern control system not only reduces the number of isolated solutions and optimizes process sequences, but also enables consistent tracking and tracing on the basis of its integrated MES functionality.

Making money with a conscience

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is nothing if not a mouthful. Multinational companies over-engage in a vast range of activities that come under the doing-good umbrella. It spans everything: from volunteering in the local community to looking after employees’ health, from giving out micro-credit to women in Bangladesh to saving the rainforests. With such a fuzzy, wide-ranging subject, many companies find it hard to know what to focus on. Still, CSR is booming. Whether through their websites or glossy reports, big multinationals want to tell the world they are good and ethical and their bosses right and reasonable. None of this means that CSR has suddenly become a great idea. But in practice few big companies can now afford to ignore it.

Warsteiner brewed by ProLeiT

The comprehensive modernization of process control systems or the migration of automation software to state-of-the-art technology are major prerequisites for more efficient and competitive brewing processes. The Warsteiner Brewery has therefore recently converted the automation technology of its entire brewing plant to ProLeiT’s modern brewmaxx V8 process control system in several project steps. In this way, the company is creating ideal conditions for extra-high productivity; on the basis of integrated materials management, the company has for the first time also achieved consistent traceability for breweries. This multi-stage project clearly demonstrates that a fundamental modernization approach of this kind can only be successful if all of the operator’s and suppliers’ specialists cooperate as closely as possible. The automation specialists require a comprehensive understanding of brewing processes because this is the only way to successfully modernize brewing plants during production.

Isomaltulose: A new, non-fermentable sugar in beer and beer specialties

Isomaltulose (Palatinose™) is a sugar naturally occurring in honey and sugar cane molasses that has become growingly popular as functional carbohydrate for beverage products after its introduction in 2005. It exhibits a number of specific characteristics that make it very suitable for use in human nutrition thus offering great potential for innovative sport- and energy drink concepts as well as functional alcohol-free malt-based beverages with balanced and sustained energy-release profile. Extensive screening tests demonstrated that many common brewing yeasts are unable to ferment isomaltulose which resulted in a positive influence on the mouth-feel of alcohol-reduced and alcohol-free beers that typically lack body.

Support for production management

In all production areas as well as in the laboratory, the Karlsberg Brauerei GmbH in Homburg uses Qualifax® from GQM mbH, Landshut as their information management system, which documents and evaluates production data for every step of the production process. Data are automatically exchanged with the ERP system.