02 / IBM · Sugar Creek Brewery · 2018
Watson IoT for a local brewery
Partnered with Bosch and Sugar Creek Brewing on a Watson IoT and computer vision system that watches every bottle as it exits the line, turning binders of handwritten readings into a live dashboard for the brewhouse.
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Team
IBM iX and Bosch engineering, with Sugar Creek brewers and owners
Duration
One quarter, on-site and remote
Platforms
Web dashboard · Watson IoT · Computer vision instrumentation
Problem
A local brewery was losing thirty thousand dollars a month to bad bottling runs.
Sugar Creek Brewing's fill levels drifted across runs, and some packaging cycles ended in heavy foaming. Foaming meant waste, but it also meant elevated dissolved oxygen, which quietly ruins flavor and shortens shelf life. Overfilled and underfilled bottles had to be uncapped, cleaned, delabeled, and sent back through the line.
The owners tracked what they could by reading gauges and filling binders with handwritten numbers. What they needed was a system that watched every bottle so they could watch the business.
Process
Ethnographic research on the brewhouse floor, then a dashboard built around what brewers actually track.
01 · On-site research
Spent days at the brewery observing the full brewing and bottling cycle, interviewing the brewmaster and owners, and documenting the moments where waste and oxygen crept in.
02 · Instrument the line
Worked with Bosch to place a camera at the exit of the bottle line and precision sensors across the brewhouse, streaming 24/7 telemetry into IBM Cloud alongside the vision data.
03 · Metrics that matter
Facilitated sessions with owners and brewers to define the fill, foam, fermentation, and temperature signals worth watching, and tied each one back to lost revenue.
04 · Data visualization
Whiteboarded with the lead developer, then designed fill-height charts, fermentation curves, and remote temperature controls that Watson could annotate as anomalies appeared.
05 · Ship inside constraints
Handed off a tight, functional UI within a compressed timeline and budget, keeping every surface legible on the brewhouse floor and reachable from any device on a secure connection.
Use cases
Screens from the shipped dashboard.
Bottling and fermentation at a glance
The primary dashboard collapses fill-height variance, fermentation state, and tank temperatures into a single glanceable surface.
Operator UI on the brewhouse floor
Detail views for individual runs and tanks, designed to stay legible on the floor and support quick action when a metric drifts.
Results
Real savings for a small business, and a flagship story for IBM IoT.
$10K
saved per month
$30K
monthly spillage identified
24/7
sensor coverage
Solving the foaming problem alone recovered about ten thousand dollars a month for Sugar Creek, out of thirty thousand in monthly spillage the team could finally see. The brewhouse moved from binders and eyeball gauge reads to calibrated, always-on data, and the project was featured at the 2018 IBM IoT Exchange and covered by Forbes as a marquee example of AI plus IoT in a working craft brewery.
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