Focus Session - A Campfire Session: Ask Me Anything About Brewery Engineering

Description: This panel will collect a diverse breadth of industry experts in brewery engineering to ask questions, present considerations, and give resources to attendees who are interested in maintaining or improving their brewery's operations. We look to focus on opportunities that are accessible for a larger portion of the brewing industry, who may not have formal engineering education nor robust staffing resources for maintenance or improvement projects. By attending this panel, brewers should leave this presentation more empowered to tackle the brewery engineering-type problems that face their brewery. The topic of brewery engineering is often thought to be limited to the large breweries with robust plants and resources. This can not be the case as our industry is met with headwinds in sales, limited budgets for maintenance and capital investment, and increased pressure from consumers and regulators to be sustainable manufacturing operations.

Relevance: See excerpt from description above:
"The topic of brewery engineering is often thought to be limited to the large breweries with robust plants and resources. This can not be the case as our industry is met with headwinds in sales, limited budgets for maintenance and capital investment, and increased pressure from consumers and regulators to be sustainable manufacturing operations."
There are more resources than ever for gaining technical skills. The expansive learning opportunities and material from the MBAA will be discussed, but other knowledge bases for unique technical skills will also be presented.

Brewing Summit 2025 Theme: As the industry continues to face headwinds in sales and expansion opportunities, maintenance and capital expense budgets have been impacted across the industry. In contrast to 10 years ago, breweries are not taking on large-scale, green field projects with robust funding available. Spending and investment have to be done deliberately. As opposed to purchasing brand new imported equipment and leaning on OEM's for correct deliverables and training, there is an expanding potential of acquiring high quality equipment at auction domestically to modify or integrate into your brewery at a much better price point. With more accessible knowledge bases and access to resources on mechanical, electrical, refrigeration, etc type topics, brewers have a great opportunity to modify their relationship with brewery engineering. This can include things like taking on projects independently as opposed to quickly hiring a contractor, or just make more fiscally responsible decisions when looking at repairs, improvements for ROI, or modifications in their brewery for safety, quality, and consistency improvements. As I talk with Brewers in the industry of various size, scale, and complexity, there is a common theme of folks attempting to "Do a Lot with a Little" - this panel will provide brewers with knowledge, ideas, and resources to do this, while maintaining a focus on the safety of the plant and quality of the product.