BRULINES acquired its reputation as the Big Brother of the brewing world during the early 1990s, when it developed the Edis system - a gizmo that remotely monitored the amount of beer sold in Britain's pubs and was designed to cut down on the endemic fraud reckoned to cost the industry a sobering £1.2bn a year.

Derided as the spy in the cellar by the nation's landlords, the system employs sensors in the beer lines and mobile phone technology to beam information from 6,500 pubs across the country back to the company's Teesside headquarters, where sales are checked against deliveries to see if the numbers match.

But Brulines, based in Stockton, is now reinventing itself as the landlord's friend with the launch last month of its latest piece of kit - the Beer Quality Monitor, a hand-held device that can tell the difference between beer, water and line-cleaning fluid and is expected to save the average pub a small fortune.

The business has also adapted its remote monitoring system to rate the quality of the beer, paving the way for a standards award similar to the AA star system for hotels, which will again reward good landlords.

During the past eight years, Brulines has had more ups and downs than a barmaid's elbow.

In the early 1990s, Derrick Collin, 55, owned a string of 30 pubs and clubs across the North-East but struggled to explain how he was failing to make a profit.

He said: "I was about six months away from going bust. Yet I was in an industry which was buoyant."

The answer was fraud. Tenants were selling beer bought from undeclared sources rather than through Mr Collin, but it was so difficult to prove he had to hire private detectives using video surveillance to catch out his troublesome tenants.

So in 1995, he poured everything he had into Brulines and the Edis system, which he reckoned could save a busy pub about £10,000 a year.

The business plan was based on selling 63 Edis units a year. In the first year, he sold 58 and made a £70,000 profit, the following year he sold 53 and broke even.

He said: "When something seems too good to be true, it usually is. No-one believed what we could do."

His dream appeared to be falling as flat as a Cockney's pint until the company had a major breakthrough. Pub group Punch placed an order for its first 200 units, followed closely afterwards by Pubmaster for 200 more. Profits doubled year on year and, by 1998, the company made a £1.2m profit. A brief flirtation with the Stock Market followed -the business was floated on the Alternative Investment Market at 60p a share, which eventually rose to £4.60 - and Brulines was the toast of the industry.

But there was trouble in store. By the summer of last year, the company had reached the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Mounting losses and a tumbling share price provoked a boardroom battle for control, which became as bitter as the beer the company monitors.

In October last year, Mr Collin had bought the company back for 20p a share and was back at the helm, although he remains chastened by the experience. He said: "I saw the market for what it was. They are, in my opinion, parasites, they have no understanding of business."

Having regrouped, Brulines is now ready to take on the world once more.

Three years ago, the company developed an intelligent flow system that had the ability not only to monitor the volume of liquid passing the sensors, but also to differentiate between liquids and provide other data, opening up possibilities.

It also assists in the search for the Holy Grail of the brewing industry - the perfect pint of beer.

Mr Collin said: "The entire industry is geared towards looking for the perfect pint.

"We are the only company in the UK who can ensure it."

Behind locked doors at Brulines' head office in Preston Farm Business Park is £500,000 worth of mind-boggling computer wizardry, which takes a constant stream of real-time data on the state of the cellars and the pumps at thousands of UK pubs.

The sensors allow for instant condition monitoring of the product - providing an immediate read-out of the temperature of the beer, the temperature of the cellar and how often the lines are cleaned, as well as the volumes sold.

Brulines' team of 80 staff monitor the information and report back via a secure website to the licensee, then police any problems that arise.

The system allows for constant monitoring of the standard of beer on sale 365 days a year, and the company is now in talks with the British Innkeepers' Institute about turning that data into an awards system, with a recognisable logo to be displayed outside the country's hostelries.

The same technology is used in the new Beer Quality Monitor, the first 1,000 of which are being manufactured at Team Valley, in Gateshead, using Dutch electronics.

Every year, the average pub pours 1,000 pints of perfectly good beer down the drain during the line-cleaning process as bar staff check for the presence of residual water or potentially dangerous caustic soda.

Brulines' new system tests it electronically in a fraction of the fluid.

The applications of the system appear endless. It can be adapted to warn of potentially lethal CO2 emissions in the cellar or remotely test the temperature of refrigerated food to ensure it meets rigorous health and safety standards.

It is already proving an invaluable tool for the marketing and advertising trade - the company recently completed a minute-by-minute assessment for Guinness to test whether sales of its product went up during England's games in the Rugby World Cup

Brulines is already considering the possibilities in other industries -remote sensing of liquid flows has obvious implications for the automotive industry, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals - which, as many a businessman has long suspected, may yet mean that the solution to many of their woes do indeed lie in drink.

The first Beer Quality Monitors have gone on sale in Germany and the company is also searching the lucrative European and Australian markets for business.

Mr Collin predicts that annual turnover, currently hovering just above £7m, will rise to somewhere nearer £40m within three years.

He said: "We have high hopes. We have already had interest from all over the world."