Brewing Up in Vietnam

A cool beer on a hot day. Doesn’t that sound refreshing? The drinkers of Vietnam certainly think so. In September, Nguyen Van Hung, vice chairman of the Vietnam Association of Beer, Alcohol and Beverages, revealed that an average Vietnamese consumed 22 liters of beer in 2008. This means that in Southeast Asia, the country is now second only to Thailand for beer consumption.

Further evidence of a thirsty Vietnam comes from Business Monitor International (BMI), which forecasts that beer sales will experience strong growth of almost 50 percent during the 2008-2013 period, due to the high levels of investment from local players and expansion-oriented multinationals. BMI also pointed out that beer sales accounted for 98 percent of all alcoholic drinks sales in 2008.

So it was not too surprising to come to the Phu Bai Industrial Park, just outside the city of Hue in central Vietnam, and see a new plant processing and bottling one of the country’s favorite beers – Huda. The name, Huda, is actually derived from Hue (HU) and Denmark (DA), since it was the Danish company Carlsberg’s partnership with Vietnam’s Hue Brewery Ltd that led to the beer’s development in 1990.

This second plant of Hue Brewery, which has been in operation since February 2008, was built at a cost of 400 billion VND (US$25 million) and has an annual capacity of 100 million liters of beer.

Control criteria

Aside from the core beer processing technology, a key step in the development of the Phu Bai plant was selection and implementation of the brewery control system.

“We had experience with Siemens before in our first plant, where S5 and S7 series PLCs are used. It’s a company that is quite well known in the brewing industry and we were quite keen to hear about some of the latest technology that they could offer,” says Ho Dang Loi, maintenance manger at Hue Brewery.

Loi, who was involved right from the tender stage of the project and right through to installation and commissioning, sat in when Siemens Vietnam senior sales manager Hoang Thi Kieu Anh came to do a presentation on PCS 7, which is Siemens’ offering for process plant control.

One key feature of PCS 7 that appealed to the project team from Hue Brewery was its batch control capability via Simatic Batch, which potentially could allow for a more managed overlap between batches and reduce overall processing time.

Another was a module called Simatic Route Control, which is designed to automate material handling transport control for plants with numerous branching pipelines or extensive tank farms.

At the bidding stage, three systems integrators offered a Siemens PCS 7 solution. In March 2007, Hue Brewery selected DKNEC Corporation to implement the control system for its new plant in Phu Bai.

The system configuration (see diagram) has S7-400 series PLCS connected down to ET 200 remote I/0 stations – for signals to and from the plant; and up to redundant servers that host the PCS 7 (and additional modules) software. An engineering station (ES) and operator stations (OS) form the human interface part of the system.

Making beer

In the brewing process, the first step involves mixing malted grain with water, and heating the mixture up to allow enzymes in the malt to break down the starch in the grain into sugars. The extracts are then separated from the spent grain to create wort, which is then boiled and hops are added for aroma and flavor compounds.

The key fermentation process then follows, when the yeast is added to the cooled wort and fermentable sugars are metabolized into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Filtering and bottling complete the process.

Six brewhouse tanks are used for the initial process stages, and these connect to 18 fermentation tanks via a piping system. It is here that the route control feature makes its mark.

In Hue Brewery’s first plant, the step of routing to a fermentation tank is a purely manual process, with the operator requiring to know which tanks are available and then physically opening the correct valves. With PCS 7 and Simatic Route Control, the correct route to a free fermentation tank is automatically decided and enabled by the software, which makes it a much more reliable and predictable process.

Having spent five years at the first plant, Loi is in a good position to compare the two systems. “We definitely had more operational problems there,” he recalls. ”Now, with this much more automated system, we save a lot of time – in batch preparation, in routing to the fermentation tanks – and reduce the number of errors that naturally tend to occur in a manually driven operation.”

Satisfying taste

Asked about some of issues that cropped during implementation, Loi cites the communications between the system integrator and the process designers as being one difficulty. This is because the process design took some time to be settled and changes would inevitably impact the PCS 7 configuration being done by the integrator.

Plant personnel received one week’s operation training on the system from the integrator. Siemens also provided Simatic Batch and Route Control training in Hanoi. Notably, this was the first ever project in Vietnam to use the Route Control product.

Currently, all the system maintenance is done by Hue Brewery staff, and familiarization with the Simatic Batch is at a sufficiently high level for them to be able to configure the recipe formulation, etc, for any new products introduced to the plant, says Loi.

Siemens’ Hoang Thi Kieu Anh has also held recent discussions with Hue Brewery regarding more advanced PCS 7 training for its engineers. Three relevant courses are available at the Siemens office in Singapore, according to Anh.

Overall, Loi professes to be “very satisfied” with the plant control system, which has been running for well over a year with “no problems”. He also mentions that he would use Siemens again, which could be in the not too distant future, as there are plans for a second phase of the plant. This would mainly involve additions to the fermentation process and packaging lines.

Coming back to what it’s all about – a nice cold glass of beer for the thirsty Vietnam consumer, Loi points to the country’s young and high population and the increasing popularity of beer as very positive indicators for the future of companies like Hue Brewery Ltd. I’ll drink (Huda) to that.