March/April 2020

Communities: Industry
NSPE Member Crafts Success for Cleveland Brewery

For many, enjoying a beer is a way to relax after work. But for NSPE member John Blystone, P.E., beer is the work.

Blystone is the manager of engineering and maintenance at Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland, Ohio. The company, founded in 1988, was the first microbrewery and brewpub in Ohio and has since grown to become one of the largest craft brewers in the United States.

“Never in a million years did I think I would be working at Great Lakes Brewing,” says Blystone, a member of the Ohio Society of Professional Engineers and graduate of nearby Akron University. After graduating in 2005 with a degree in electrical engineering, Blystone served as an electrical and control systems engineer with several companies in different industries before joining Great Lakes in July 2013.

Blystone earned his Ohio PE license in December 2013. As a member of Akron University’s advisory committee for the electrical and computer engineering department, he encourages students, and all engineers he meets, to pursue the license.

“That’s one thing I wished I had done a lot sooner when I was getting started after college,” he says. “I waited about six years later than I should have.”

Blystone has many duties at the popular and growing brewery, which is the 20th largest craft brewer in the US and the 30th largest brewer overall based on total sales volume, according to the Brewers Association. He oversees the maintenance, design, implementation, and optimization of automation systems and equipment that uses electrical power, electronics, and electromagnetics. The goal: “to make sure that we are producing beer as quickly, efficiently, and consistently as possible.”

Since joining the company, Blystone has focused on automating more of its processes. For craft brewers, striving for efficiency is necessary to compete with larger companies like Anheuser-Busch. At the same time, they need to maintain the distinct flavors of their different styles, like Great Lakes’ Smash IPA, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, and Eliot Ness Amber Lager.

That means a focused approach to incorporating new technologies and new forms of automation. In 2017, Blystone was featured in an article on CNBC.com for the brewery’s implementation of Shelby, a chatbot created with the natural language processing of Microsoft and industrial technology from Rockwell Automation. With Shelby, Blystone and other engineers on staff can track the progress of all the steps in the brewing process on a graphical interface.

Blystone also helped automate 17 manual steps in the brewing process known as lautering, the process of removing the sweet liquid wort from the mashed grains.

In the bottling line, he helped with a project that enables the brewery to recycle its rinse water to cool a vacuum pump used to equalize pressure and fluid movement in the beer-filling process.

And about a year after joining Great Lakes, Blystone took part in a $7.1 million project to install four 22,000-gallon fermenters and two 22,000-gallon bright tanks that hold the filtered beer in preparation for packaging. The project included adding a new 500-ton chiller and an upgrade to the brewery’s main electrical service.

Beer brewing is both an art and a science. But when the goal is 36 million bottles a year of quality beer, an engineer’s mind is a must. “This job is definitely not a desk job; every day you get to solve a new problem or streamline a new solution to a different process,” Blystone says. “All of that to ensure the perfect pint of beer.”