Project E02 ATHANOR by BUNGUS

Project Roadmap

Empathize

Small breweries are operating in a market with much less room for error than before. In the U.S., 529 craft breweries closed in 2024 while only 430 opened, the first year since 2005 that closures outpaced openings. Craft beer production volume also fell 3.9% in 2024, showing that brewers are competing in a tighter, slower-growth market.

That pressure is visible in Singapore too. Archipelago Brewery closed in 2024, with its owner citing declining craft beer market realities and high operational costs.

In this environment, small breweries cannot afford quality mistakes. The Brewers Association states that producing beer that is free of off-flavors and true-to-brand is of paramount importance to a brewery’s success. It also warns that microbiological issues may be found before they are obvious to a tasting panel, and that combining beer with quality issues multiplies spoilage and reputational risk.

The problem is that current quality control methods are often hard for smaller breweries to sustain. The Brewers Association notes that balancing cost of goods, fermentation performance, production schedules, sales targets, and quality management is a real challenge. It has also acknowledged that small producers can be burdened if compliance or validation requires expensive new equipment or repeated use of outside laboratories.

Define

Small and independent breweries need a practical, affordable way to monitor fermentation quality early and consistently, so they can detect problems before they become spoiled batches, lost tank time, and damaged brand trust.

Solution

Athanor is a hook-on fermentation monitoring system designed for small breweries. It gives brewers earlier visibility into what is happening inside the tank, helping them catch quality issues sooner, reduce avoidable losses, and make quality control more practical within real brewery constraints.

How does Athanor work?

Athanor is a plug-and-play fermentation monitoring system that gives breweries real-time visibility into fermentation performance — without complex lab testing.

Sensor data is collected continuously, processed in real time, and visualised on a web dashboard accessible from any device.

What Athanor Monitors:

Dissolved Oxygen (DO)
Measures oxygen levels at ppb precision

Specific Gravity (SG)
Tracks sugar conversion in real time

pH
Monitors acidity throughout fermentation

Temperature
Tracks fermentation temperature with high precision

Volatile Compounds (VDK)
Uses sensor + ML model to detect off-flavours

Overall System Architecture

Hardware Solutions

Our Hardware solutions comprises mechanical and electrical design.

Tough, lightweight and heat resistant

Athanor is built for usage with real brews which are succeptable to contamination. Therefore, specific materials were selected.

Stainless Steel 316

Sterialisable, Exceptional strength and commercial brewery standard.

Nylon PA12

Medical grade polymer, suitable for high heat cleaning, tough and lightweight.

Silicon tubing

Anti-fouling surface, easily sanitised and watertight.

Works with all commercial fermentation tanks

Athanor is designed for compatibility with commercial fermentation tanks, allowing it to be attached directly to standard brewery tank connections. This enables easier integration into existing brewing operations without the need for major system changes.

By fitting into established brewery workflows, Athanor makes continuous fermentation monitoring more practical and accessible in real production environments.

Attaching Athanor into the fermentation tank

Intuitive light indication system

🔴 Red — Error / Disconnected
Connection lost or system issue detected

🟢 Green — Starting / Initialising
Device is powered on and connecting to server

🔵 Blue — Idle State
Connected and ready for sampling

🟠 Orange — Sampling State
Active testing in progress

Contamination-free fluid circulation

Athanor uses pinch valves and peristaltic pumps to control fluid movement through a closed, sterile flow path. This allows fermenting liquid to be drawn into the system for testing and then recirculated back into the fermenter once testing is complete.

Because the liquid remains within a controlled tubing path and only comes into contact with the relevant food-safe flow components, the system helps maintain sterility, reduce contamination risk.

Integrated Electronics System

Athanor is powered by an custom designed main control PCB that acts as the system’s central controller.

It manages the activation of pumps, valves, and other mechanisms, while also triggering sensors, collecting readings, and communicating with the server in real time.

This allows Athanor to coordinate both the physical sampling process and the data flow required for fermentation monitoring.

Refined through multiple iterations, the electronics system is optimised for compact integration, reliability, and real-world deployment.

Software Solutions

Athanor’s AI powered software system transforms raw sensor data into real-time, interpretable insights, enabling brewers to monitor fermentation, detect issues early, and make informed decisions without specialised expertise.

Overall Software Architecture

Dashboard Interface

Athanor features an easy-to-use web-based dashboard that gives brewers real-time visibility into fermentation performance across active batches.

The dashboard translates sensor outputs into a clearer, more usable view of the brewing process, allowing brewers to track fermentation progress, monitor key parameters, and respond more quickly to changing conditions.

Key Features:

Real-time data visualisation for live fermentation monitoring
Trend monitoring to track batch progression over time
Configurable alerts based on user-defined thresholds
Multi-device support for monitoring multiple fermenters

With this interface, Athanor makes fermentation data more accessible, actionable, and easier to use in day-to-day brewery operations.

Custom Built machine learning beer flavour analysis system

Suboptimal fermentation can result in buttery, popcorn-like off-flavours known as vicinal diketones (VDKs), a critical quality issue for brewers.

Athanor addresses this with a custom-built machine learning model that estimates VDK concentration in ppb without requiring routine lab access.

As more fermentation data is collected across batches, the model continuously improves, becoming more accurate and more robust over time.

User Feedback

Athanor has been, and continues to be, rigorously tested internally as the system is refined and validated.

It has also been demonstrated at Sunbird Brewery, where it showed strong potential to function within a real brewing environment and workflow.

The team has been actively working with Sunbird Brewery throughout the process, using their practical input and collaboration to shape improvements, strengthen real-world relevance, and guide the system towards further brewery testing.

Poster

In partnership with :

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Marie Siew Therese Hui Lin, our Capstone mentor, for her guidance in business modelling, her support on prototyping-related issues, and her advice on administrative matters. We are also deeply grateful to Dr Susan Wong, our Communication Writing and Research mentor, for going above and beyond to support us with literature sourcing and presentation development.

We would also like to acknowledge Sin Liang, Head of Beer Innovation at Sunbird Brewery, and Andrew from Little Island Brewing Co. for their extensive support and for helping connect us to the brewery community in Singapore.

Finally, we thank the Venture and Incubation Experience (VIE) Office for their continued support and for the opportunities they provided throughout this journey, especially Celestine, Weiren, Mao, and Jason.