Fermentation temperature monitoring for wineries and breweries: what to measure and how to choose a system
A fermentation that runs too hot or stalls usually shows it in temperature first, and the cooling that keeps it on track can fail when nobody is in the cellar. A monitoring system reads every tank, keeps its history and sends an alarm while there is still time to act.
What to measure in each tank
- Must or wort temperature: a probe in the thermowell, not on the tank wall. It is the reading the fermentation curve is built on.
- Pressure or level: only where the tank has a fitting for it. Useful in closed fermenters and to know how full each tank is.
- Cellar air: temperature and humidity of the room, which affect every tank and every barrel in it.
- Glycol supply: the temperature leaving the chiller. One sensor here tells you whether the whole cellar still has cooling.
Alarms that matter at night
Not every reading needs to wake someone. The ones that do are a tank rising above its range during active fermentation, the glycol supply warming up, and a probe that stops reporting. Set the range per tank and per stage, choose who is notified, and send those alarms as a voice call.
Each alarm can go by email, SMS, WhatsApp, voice call or push notification in the iOS and Android app. The rest of the readings stay in the history for the morning.
Wireless probes or per-tank controllers?
Wineries and breweries usually look at specialist systems. In the US the names that come up are TankNET by Acrolon, VinWizard, Winegrid, BrewOps, Brewmation and AccuBrew; in Spain, Agrovin, SIGENA Enocontrol, VinPilot, Onafis and SlowBeer. Many of them are built around a controller or a sensor on each tank, often wired to its cooling valve, and are sold per tank.
Our approach is different: wireless probes that you add without rewiring, and one view with alarms over the whole cellar, including the chiller and the rooms. If you already have tank controllers, they keep doing their job; equipment that speaks Modbus or OPC UA can be read through our edge software gateway, which sends the data to the platform over MQTT. We do not control the fermentation automatically or measure density.
| Controller per tank | Wireless probes + platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Installation | Wiring to each tank and its valve | Battery probes, one gateway for the building |
| What it covers | The tanks it is installed on | Tanks, chiller, cellar and cold rooms in one view |
| Cooling control | Often built in | Where a relay or the existing controller allows it |
History per tank and per batch
Every reading is stored with its tank, so you can see the curve of a fermentation from start to finish and compare it with the previous batch or vintage. It also gives you a record of the cellar and cold room temperatures for the whole season.
How to start
Start with the tanks that ferment at the same time during the busiest weeks, plus one sensor on the glycol supply. Probes connect through a LoRaWAN gateway and network servers such as The Things Stack, LORIOT, ThingPark X or ChirpStack; other equipment can send data over MQTT or HTTP.
The platform runs on AWS (Frankfurt for Europe, United States for the rest of the world) or on your own servers.
