We developed a comprehensive process model of beer production using Aspen Plus® to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of a small-scale, grassroots brewing operation. The brewing process was represented as an integrated sequence of unit operations, from malted barley through mashing, lautering, wort boiling with hop addition, fermentation, conditioning, and packaging. Each stage was modeled using appropriate reactor, separator, and heat-transfer blocks to capture mass and energy balances, phase behavior, and simplified reaction kinetics, with particular emphasis on starch conversion during mashing, solid-liquid separation during lautering, and biochemical fermentation of sugars to ethanol and carbon dioxide.
We used the simulation to estimate utility requirements, material flows, and equipment duties at industrially relevant production scale, incorporating these outputs into a preliminary economic analysis of capital investment, operating costs, and revenue streams. Equipment sizing, utility consumption, labor, and raw material costs were evaluated under conservative pricing assumptions. The analysis also considered value recovery from byproducts, including spent grain and carbon dioxide, and the influence of energy and water usage on operating expenses.
Malted barley was selected as the primary feedstock for its established brewing performance and well-characterized enzymatic sugar generation. Our combined simulation and financial assessment demonstrated that Aspen Plus is a suitable platform for modeling complex biochemical food and beverage processes, providing meaningful insight into scalability and profitability, and illustrating how process simulation can bridge chemical engineering fundamentals with practical business considerations in brewing facility design.