I'd love to get involved in creating a decent piece of brewery management software, I've heard it's all pretty horrific (from a sample size of two). What's the state of the art in brewing software?
I think the 'big' answer is all about low-level control logic and embedded systems. I can't speak to how horrifying it is relative to other industrial controls, but they're a world all their own.
On a homebrew scale, though, there's some awesome stuff like this: http://ohmbrewer.org/
The idea is that it's an actually valuable spot for an IoT product, because homebrewers would rather not sit for hours measuring exactly when to advance the brew. So you put together a monitoring-and-transition system, plug in your specs, and OhmBrew automates the process. Also, open source so you can check out what they're building.
(I'm not affiliated, but I met them and they seemed like awesome software & beer geeks.)
