**8. Continuous bottling**

The most expensive and labour-intensive part of the value creation in breweries is the bottling part. Here most breweries produce continuously, as several machines are needed. Depalletisers for new or crated return bottles, washing machines or rinsers, inspection machines fillers, pasteurisers, labelling machines, packers, wrappers, shrink machines and palettisers run more or less continuously. Stops and interruptions have to be buffered by the conveyers, usually able to keep machines running, while the other needs time to repair so that the previous or following machines need not stop. Modern bottling lines have frequency-controlled conveyers and machinery so that the assembly, connected by system bus, can alter their speed to keep up the continuous production.

The big challenge is changing of the products, the beer type, the labels or the shape and size of the bottles. In bottling, when the beer arrives filtered, sterile and stable, mostly physical deviations have to be handled. Product safety has to assure clean, not contaminated bottles. Camera systems or even gamma or X-ray is used to check the bottles, cans or kegs. Rejected containers have to be replaced by the following shipshape containers. Bottle burst leads to splinter showers, where open bottles have to be removed, eventually contaminated by sharp-edged glass.

Mistakes in this process certainly propagate downstream, if not corrected immediately. A dirty bottle becomes a dirty filled and corked bottle, is labelled and packed and—in the worst case—is sold and consumed. Sensors and camera systems should check the system at the highest accuracy possible, as the process goes on and might lead to big amounts of unsafe products at the far end of the beer production and the intersection to the customers and consumers. The more precise the process is performed, the safer the product and the more the consumers' expectations can be met.
