The Dominic Brewery case study. Read this before any stage
Everything you need for the six practice stages is in the exhibits below and in the lesson videos. It all reads on a phone and nothing needs to be downloaded. Watch the video at the top of each Practical Application lesson before you attempt that stage, the videos give you the context for the whole case. Tap an exhibit to open it.
Exhibit A: The company and its people
Dominic Brewery is a South African craft brewery. It brews, bottles and pasteurises a single lager sold through bottle stores and supermarkets. A major retail customer now requires a certified HACCP system before it renews the listing, and the managing director has asked for a HACCP study to be built. Four senior staff are available to the project:
- Thandi, BSc Food Science, 6 years in quality assurance, HACCP trained.
- Sipho, Brewery Operations Manager, 15 years of brewing experience, no HACCP training.
- Anita, Financial Manager, MBA, 12 years with the company.
- Johan, Sales Director, knows every customer in the province.
The brewery also employs a production and brewing team, maintenance and engineering staff, a laboratory and microbiology technician, a hygiene and CIP team, and a small finance and sales office. An outside consultant drafted the first version of the plan.
Exhibit B: The product and the law that applies to it
The product is a bottled lager of about 5 percent alcohol, brewed from malted barley, hops, water and yeast. Malted barley is a cereal containing gluten. Sodium metabisulphite is used in the process, and the finished beer can carry sulphites at 10 mg per kilogram or more. The beer is filled into glass bottles, crowned, pasteurised and packed into cases.
The beer is stored ambient and dry, out of direct sunlight, and is distributed in closed vehicles at ambient temperature. It is sold to adults of legal drinking age, 18 years and older. The label carries the notice that it is not for sale to persons under 18 and the warning against drinking during pregnancy. Excessive consumption is a known misuse of any alcoholic product.
South African law that applies to this product includes Regulation R638 on the hygiene of food premises, the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act 54 of 1972, and the Liquor Act 59 of 2003.
Exhibit C: The process, from grain to truck
The Lesson 7 video walks through this process, watch it before Stage 4. The beer is made like this: the malt is first milled, then mashed with hot water. The mash is lautered to separate the sweet wort from the spent grain. The wort is boiled with hops, which inactivates enzymes, isomerises the hops and sets the flavour. The boiled wort is clarified, then cooled, and yeast is added for fermentation. After fermentation the beer is conditioned, then packaged, which means bottle filling and crowning. The sealed bottles are pasteurised, and the cases finally go to storage and distribution.
At every step the HACCP team records the inputs of that step: the ingredients, processing aids, water, packaging and the equipment that touches the product there.
Exhibit D: The two engineered controls on the line
After filling and crowning, the sealed bottles pass through a tunnel pasteuriser. The validated process holds the beer at 65 degrees Celsius for a set time. The brewery operates the pasteuriser at 67 degrees, so that normal drift is caught and corrected before the validated minimum of 65 degrees is ever reached.
After the pasteuriser, every bottle passes through a metal detector. The detector is challenged with certified test pieces, 2.0 mm stainless steel, 2.5 mm ferrous and 2.5 mm non ferrous, each passed through the detector in a bottle at line start up and at set intervals during the run, with the rejection of each test piece confirmed and recorded.
One afternoon at 14h00 the detector fails its test piece check. The last successful check was at 10h00, and the line ran the whole morning.
Exhibit E: The hazards the team has raised
In its first hazard workshop the team listed, among others: glass fragments in the beer from bottle breakage at the filler, pathogens surviving in the product if pasteurisation fails, caustic CIP residue left in bottles after cleaning, dust on the malt store floor, and skew labels on bottles. Rate hazards with the course risk matrix from the HACCP Practical briefing, likelihood against severity, before deciding what goes through the CCP decision tree.