EFFICIENCY
squared Written by George B. Catallo Photo provided by Los Angeles Distillery
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e’ve all had experiences that have shown us there is sometimes a disconnect between theory and practice. Times where the textbook is wrong, even though the math says it shouldn’t be. Equipment that’s designed and supposed to work one way, but doesn’t. Enter Lewis Harsanyi of both Los Angeles Distillery and Bavarian-Holstein Partners, the dual brewery and distillery equipment manufacturer. Lewis not only designs, manufactures, and installs distillery systems, he uses his own systems on a daily basis. A man who looks for balance between theory and practice. If you spend any time speaking with Harsanyi you will quickly see that one topic interests him above all else: efficiency. Harsanyi holds a degree in engineering and a PhD in mathematics, and was a teacher of economic efficiency behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest, Hungary. For those not old enough to remember, the Iron Curtain was the name for the western border of the Soviet Union. This border was not just a line on the map, but acted as a veil isolating the Soviet Union from the rest of the world militarily, politically, socially, and economically post WWII. Harsanyi escaped life behind the Iron Curtain more than 40 years ago and came to the United States to work in technology for a number of years. After the Iron Curtain’s fall in 1991, Harsanyi returned to his home of Hungary after the legalization of privatized industry and started his own company manufacturing brewing equipment. Harsanyi renamed the company from Bavarian Brewery Technologies to Bavarian Breweries & Distilleries Inc. in August 2003 and has since supplied countless distilleries around North America and the world. Efficiency in the design of a distillery certainly includes efficiency of fermentation and distillation and maximizing yield, but it goes beyond that. Harsanyi and I discussed the categorization of distillery input into two primary categories: physical and intellectual. Physical input would be any manual labor, such as moving grain, pumping mash back and forth between tanks, bottling, cleaning, etc. Intellectual input is the actual running of the still, making cuts, feeding yeast, managing fermentation — the actual science of it all. Ideally, the more efficiently physical input is handled, the more focus can be placed on intellectual input.
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There are numerous ways to go about this. One way could be to hire more employees to do physical tasks. It’s more efficient in the sense that you yourself are not expending the time and energy, but it is not always more economically efficient. There’s a greater financial cost and the amount of labor is unchanged. If you can afford it, however, it’s viable. Harsanyi’s approach aims to be more economically efficient when amortized across the life of a business, making physical labor easier through automation. Many physical aspects of distilling can be automated. Grain can be weighed, milled, and augered into the mash tun at the flick of a switch. Finished mash can be pumped to fermenters via a permanent pipe system instead of a portable pump and hoses. That same system can carry fermented mash to the still, and a CIP (clean-in-place) system can leave equipment sanitary for the next shift at the touch of a button. The goal of automation is not to replace all jobs with machines, leaving everyone out in the cold and hungry. While of course, in a smaller operation, it could help keep labor costs down by having less workers, but that isn’t always the most efficient option. Perhaps the labor budget is fine where it is, but it could be better spent EFFICIENCY on different types of staff such as more DEFINED BY HARSANYI: tasting room workers, office staff, sales To produce with minimum people, marketing people — the types input and maximum output. of people who help grow the business. Reallocating cash directly into growth. Before Harsanyi opened Los Angeles ECONOMIC Distillery in 2013, he visited Scotland EFFICIENCY numerous times and pondered, “How DEFINED BY INVESTOPEDIA: can I make more flavorful whisky than When all goods and the Scots?” A bold question, with a factors of production in an economy are distributed bold goal of beating the Scots at their or allocated to their most own game. valuable uses and waste is eliminated or minimized.
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