Application Note

2 Fluke Corporation Yuengling brews up a winning maintenance approach
A really lean company
Electrical supervisor Bill Fried-
man has worked at the Tampa
plant since 2000. The Yuengling
maintenance team of nine
mechanics, plus Friedman and
two other electricians, led by
plant engineer Santo Lazarra,
keeps the vintage facility brew-
ing and bottling up to a million
barrels of beer yearly. Ironically,
brewing a product people use
for end-of-day relaxation has
its own tensions. It takes a very
lean operation to win against
mega-brewers many times
Yuengling’s size.
That suits Yuengling just fine.
Frugal and no-nonsense, Dick
Yuengling describes himself
as a “production guy,” accord-
ing to The Wall Street Journal.
Yuengling’s 250 employees pro-
duce as much beer as the 700
employees at a major competitor.
The Yuengling formula seems to
be working. The paper reported
that Yuengling sales grew 12
percent, to two million barrels,
in 2009—the only double-digit
growth rate among the 10 larg-
est US beer suppliers.
Dick Yuengling “runs a really
lean company,” said Friedman.
“He doesn’t have a lot of over-
head as far as management.
Here in the brewery you walk
around—there used to be maybe
30 offices here [under Stroh’s],
and 20 percent of those are
occupied.”
In a plant that’s now more
than 50 years old, maintenance
“is a constant battle,” Friedman
said, “although here in the past
three or four years we’ve been
investing some money in a lot of
good improvements. We just got
a new bottle packer that puts
it in the 12-pack, and we are
now putting in another packer
that can do the fridge packs
and 24-packs, what we call the
suitcase packs.”
A preventive maintenance
(PM) approach might seem
ideal in such an older facility.
“It sounds good and looks good
on paper, but you really don’t
have the manpower to do a PM
program,” Friedman said. “While
we definitely do PM on the cru-
cial machines, we have limited
resources, and as a result, a lot
of the time we spend in work
out in the field is repairs. It’s just
time for the bearing to wear or
the motor to go.”
What is a “crucial machine”?
The brewery powerhouse is
crucial, where gas-fed boilers
produce steam that supplies
the brewing kettles and pas-
teurizers. “If the powerhouse
goes down, the whole plant
goes down,” Friedman said. Air
compressors powered by 150-hp
motors supply the plant with
air at 120 psi, used to clean
kegs before filling. Any device
that could fail and affect prod-
uct quality is also considered
crucial.
“That’s a lot of money
. . . especially if you’re
wrong”
To keep these machines online,
Friedman relies on Fluke test
equipment, including thermal
imagers, a wide array of electri-
cal test tools, and the new Fluke
810 Vibration Tester.
“One of the things I try to do
on a regular basis is thermal
imaging,” Friedman said. “I use
it on our major equipment—our
ammonia compressor or our
mash tub agitator, a huge mixer
that stirs the ingredients. Obvi-
ously heat is a good indicator of
impending failure on the motor
bearings and on the gearbox
itself. Even on water tank levels,
It’s a long way from 1829, when Yuengling
opened its first brewery in Pennsylvania.
These controls operate the keg line.
Photo Courtesy of Yuengling Brewery.
if I don’t know what the level
is and I just want to spot-check
against our instruments, I’ll use
the thermal imager.”
The imager spotted trouble
recently in the 75 hp motor
powering a positive displace-
ment blower that transfers spent
grain 250 feet to a storage silo.
“We were having sporadic issues
with it,” Friedman said. “I got a
thermal imager and I could see
that the motor was just running
way, way too hot—about 230°F
(110  ° C).”
Friedman used his Fluke
1735 Three-Phase Power
Logger to check the machine’s
performance. “Because it is a
positive-displacement pump, if
you know the amount of current
draw and the speed that the
blower is running, it should be
putting out a constant amount
of pressure,” he said. “If it’s not,
then you have a problem. Com-
paring those factors we could
see that we weren’t getting the
output we should.”
A follow-up test with the
Fluke 810 Vibration Tester iden-
tified a bad bearing at the free
end of the motor, so Friedman
changed out the motor. But prob-
lems continued. “When you have
two pieces of equipment that
are bad, which one is it—is it the
blower or the motor?” Friedman
said. “It’s a chicken and egg sit-
uation. After we knew the motor
was good, because it was new,
we put the 810 on again and it
showed that the drive end bear-
ing of the blower was bad.” The
issue became one of confidence.
Could the 810 be trusted?
“The blower is massive—you
can’t just say we’ll change it and
see if it works, because it’s not a
five-minute job,” Friedman said.
“You’re looking at five to eight
hours of downtime and that’s a
lot of money...especially if you’re
wrong. So you have to be pretty
confident in your analysis.” The
blower bearing was indeed bad,
and caused vibration that in turn
had damaged the motor.