Customer application

From Heritage to High-Confidence Brewing

Orm’s Brewhouse operates out of 14th-century farm buildings on the Ormside Hall Estate in rural Cumbria. A location rich in history, but one that presents real challenges for modern manufacturing. Founded in 2025, the five-barrel (5BBL) craft brewery set out to combine traditional character with consistent quality, efficiency and sustainable growth. The brewhouse was built around refurbished vessels, pumps and extraction equipment. Mechanically, the system was sound. From a control and automation perspective, however, it was extremely limited. The existing panel offered little more than basic start/stop functionality, with no recipe management, no automated dosing, no alarms and no meaningful process feedback. Critical brewing stages relied heavily on manual intervention. Volumes were estimated, temperatures adjusted by experience rather than data, and additions timed manually. For a small brewery, this created genuine risk of inconsistent beer quality, wasted water and ingredients, long and stressful brew days, unnecessary energy use and limited scope to scale production with confidence.

The Challenge: Modern Brewing Control Without Over-Complexity

Orm’s Brewhouse was not looking for a generic, closed brewery automation package. The brief was clear:

Improve accuracy and repeatability without removing brewer control
Reduce risk and stress on brew day • Gain visibility into what the process is actually doing
Keep the system flexible, open and future proof

After unsuccessful discussions with system integrators, the team approached WAGO directly. Partly because legacy WAGO components were already in use. Rather than proposing an off-the-shelf solution, WAGO’s application engineering team began with a site visit, working closely with the brewers to understand the process, the constraints of the historic estate and the brewery’s long-term ambitions.

The Solution: Open, Scalable Brewery Automation With WAGO

At the heart of the upgrade was the replacement of the legacy controller with a WAGO PFC100 PLC (750-8112), supported by modular I/O to improve connectivity, monitoring and future expandability. To bring real insight into the brewing process, IO-Link smart sensors from Endress+Hauser were integrated via a WAGO IO-Link master module (750-1657). For the first time, accurate measurements of flow, temperature and viscosity were available, alongside reliable volume totalisation throughout the process. In practical terms, this enabled:

Automated Hot Liquor Tank (HLT) temperature control, compensating for ambient conditions
Precise water dosing using flow measurement, stopping pumps exactly at target volumes
Safety cut-offs and alarms to protect equipment and prevent unplanned downtime

The control software was engineered from the ground up around Orm’s actual brewing process, rather than forcing it to fit a generic template. A new HMI provides clear, intuitive visibility of each brewing stage, giving brewers confidence in what the system is doing at all times.

Brewing With Data, Not Guesswork

The upgraded system supports recipe entry and storage, visualisation of water dosing during mashing, and automated prompts for key additions during the boil. Critical process parameters are logged, creating a growing dataset that supports consistency and continuous improvement. Temperature control during fermentation, often spanning several days is now fully automated, including a controlled step-down chilling process at the end of fermentation to protect yeast health. When it comes time to rack, brewers know exactly how much beer is available, allowing the correct number of casks to be cleaned and prepared in advance. Remote connectivity configured by the Orm’s Brewhouse team allows WAGO engineers to provide support and troubleshooting without the need for site visits. This is a major advantage for a rural brewery.

The Result: Energy Efficiency, Sustainability and a Future Ready Platform

Since the upgrade, Orm’s Brewhouse has gained a far higher level of confidence in its brewing process. Improved temperature control has significantly increased consistency, automation has reduced waste and manual intervention, and brew days are shorter and less stressful. Energy efficiency has also improved. Automated pump shutdowns, timed HLT heating and better process visibility have reduced unnecessary runtime, lowering both energy consumption and operating costs. Crucially, the modern control platform provides a foundation for future optimisation. The brewery already operates a large on-site solar installation and has written an API to enable surplus solar generation to be diverted into heating the HLT. Electricity worth around £0.08 per kWh when exported from solar sources can instead offset heat that would otherwise cost around £0.24 per kWh. This capability is planned as the next step and is only possible because the control system has been designed from the outset with safety, openness and extendibility in mind.

Efficiency isn’t just about saving time or ingredients — it’s what allows a small brewery like ours to grow. With WAGO’s automation in place, we finally have the visibility and control we need to trust the process from start to finish

Why WAGO Was the Perfect Automation Partner

WAGO was the ideal partner because the project demanded flexible, open and scalable industrial automation, not a closed proprietary system. WAGO’s open approach allowed the WAGO PLC and control architecture to be engineered around the brewery’s real process, ensuring accuracy, repeatability and long-term flexibility. As a vendor-agnostic automation provider, WAGO seamlessly integrated IO-Link sensors alongside existing equipment, protecting prior investment while enabling modern, data-driven brewery automation. The modular, scalable architecture ensures the solution can evolve as production volumes, recipes and energy optimisation ambitions grow. Most importantly, WAGO’s application engineering team worked directly with the brewers, combining deep automation expertise with hands-on process understanding to deliver a robust, future-ready system the brewing team can trust.