Craft Brewer

Lakefront Brewery, a Milwaukee-based craft brewer founded in 1987, faced a production bottleneck as consumer demand outpaced the capacity of its aging bottle-filling equipment. By 2012, the brewery had grown to 33,368 barrels annually, distributing across 35 states and Canada. Their existing filler struggled to maintain the precise oxygen control critical to beer quality — even trace oxygen exposure during filling causes stale, off-flavors — while also limiting throughput to 120 bottles per minute. Managing changeovers across 22 beer varieties, only 12 of which are year-round, added further operational drag. The brewery needed a cost-effective solution sized for a mid-volume craft operation, not the large-scale lines built for major producers.

Lakefront partnered with Wisconsin-based machine builder KHS USA to design the Innofill Micro Glass-Bottle Filler — a purpose-built system for mid-sized craft output. Rockwell Automation joined the design team from the outset, integrating their Integrated Architecture platform into the machine. An Allen-Bradley CompactLogix programmable automation controller coordinates tightly with Kinetix 6500 servo drives and MP Series servo motors over an EtherNet/IP network, consolidating motion control onto a single industrial network and eliminating dedicated motion cabling. RSLogix 5000 provides a unified programming environment, while Motion Analyzer software was used during design to size and select optimal servo motors based on torque requirements. An Allen-Bradley PanelView Plus HMI running FactoryTalk View Machine Edition software allows operators to store and recall product recipes, directly reducing changeover time across bottle sizes and seasonal brews.

The upgrade delivered measurable gains across throughput, quality, and operational efficiency:

• Production speed increased from 120 to 180 bottles per minute, with capacity headroom up to 400 bottles per minute
• Machine uptime improved from 70% to approximately 90%, enabling a reduction from two shifts to a single 10-hour shift per day
• Oxygen measurement error reduced by 80–90%, directly improving beer freshness and shelf stability
• Scrap rate cut by 80%, eliminating the six or seven misfilled or mis-crowned cases per run that previously occurred

Changeover between bottle sizes and seasonal recipes — previously a significant drag on a 22-SKU lineup — became markedly faster through recipe recall on the HMI.

• Involving the automation vendor in machine design from the start — not as an afterthought — enabled tighter integration and better performance at lower cost.
• For craft beverage producers, precise oxygen control during filling is as critical as production speed; quality and throughput improvements are not mutually exclusive.
• Unified networking (EtherNet/IP) across drives, motors, and controllers simplifies diagnostics and reduces long-term maintenance burden.
• HMI-based recipe management pays outsized dividends in operations with high SKU variety and frequent seasonal changeovers.
• Mid-sized manufacturers can access industrial-grade automation by selecting machine builders who design specifically for smaller production volumes.