FDBusiness.com

Award-winning brewer Timothy Taylor has been using the Tinytag Radio Data Logging System to help ensure that its Yorkshire Beers are always enjoyed in perfect condition.

The Keighley-based family brewery has produced premium cask beers since 1858, and is the last of its kind in West Yorkshire. Its main brands are Landlord, Best Bitter & Golden Best – all prize winning cask ales – and the loggers are used at various stages of the production process to help maintain strict quality control standards.

Senior Brewer Nick Berkovits is responsible for Timothy Taylor’s Quality Management Systems, and as part of this role initially deployed stand-alone Tinytag data loggers to monitor temperatures in the company’s delivery fleet. Quality of product is paramount at the brewery, and extends to the delivery fleet which has been fitted with coolers since the mid 1990s.

The Tinytags were essential in helping to ensure that the coolers worked effectively and efficiently. This in turn provided evidence that the beers were well kept throughout the supply chain and offered a fast and simple traceability tool that could be referenced in the company’s QMSs.

Despite the loggers’ success, accessing them for downloading the recorded data on the back of the lorries was not particularly easy, especially as timing was critical. Nick’s attention was drawn to the Tinytag Radio System as an alternative. The Radio System is ideal in situations where manually collecting data from multiple logging points may be impractical, as data is automatically sent to a receiver connected to a PC for immediate viewing and analysis.

Loggers monitoring temperature in refrigerated delivery vehicles will store data locally when the vehicle is out, then automatically offload it once returned to the depot and within range of the Radio System’s mesh network.

The company switched to using radio loggers which proved robust enough to sit securely on the vehicles, standing up especially to the rough and tumble of third-party fork lift truck activity. And, as Nick points out, best of all: no more climbing onto the back of a wagon armed with a PC and cable!

Primarily, the loggers ensure that the coolers are working correctly, and where problems arise they allow faulty equipment to be rapidly identified. They have provided additional benefits in terms of traceability, helping with the tracking of the vehicles and also their load times. Over the years Timothy Taylor has expanded the coverage to include all of its warehousing facilities, currently utilising around 16 loggers in total. The latest additions monitor not only the temperature but also the humidity of its hop stores: the company pays premiums for its whole hops and the loggers again provide the confidence and knowledge required to preserve their quality.

Nick concludes: “Tinytag Radio Data loggers have proved irreplaceably useful in allowing us to move the company’s quality standards forward, and even helped us to achieve Cask Marque accreditation for our warehousing depots! I don’t know what we’d do without them!”