Cider Corner: 3 QCQA Points to Consider

Consistency is the name of the game with any product, and having a handle on your quality control quality assurance process is a big part of achieving it.

Highpoint Cider’s taproom and production facility is in Victor, Idaho, and co-founder and COO Andrew Perez recently shared with Brewer Magazine how his small-batch cidery that sells its product in Idaho, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming handles QCQA.

Here are three areas Highpoint carefully pays attention to maintain quality and consistency.

Tracking

Tracking and lab work are key to improving packaging and ensuring shelf stability and freshness, and Perez said optimization in that area continues to be a priority for Highpoint, which has added ATP meters that monitor and detect the presence of microbial contamination in water and surfaces. 

ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is present in all organic material and is the universal unit of energy used in all living cells.

“Record where everything goes — always,” Perez said. “We are in the process of building out our lab, and making our tracking and QC program more robust with ATP meters, microscopy, cell/tissue culture, and chronological testing across both warm and cold storage.”

Testing

Testing your product is the backbone of any quality program, Perez noted. Highpoint’s team tests real-life scenarios to see how its cider is going to hold up on the shelves.

“We do most of our testing in house and try to replicate as many different in market scenarios as possible across our canned product line,” he said.

Customer Feedback

Despite best efforts, sometimes there can still be a quality issue with products that are on the shelves. In that case, your customers will be the ones to let you know something is off.

While that might sound like any cidery’s worst nightmare, it happens and getting to the bottom of it quickly is the name of the game.

“We are building that pipeline out: Basically we get an inbound question/comment/concern, and via our packaging we can work with the individual to identify the product, batch, package date, etcetera then find those in our product libraries and work to examine the product and sample the product to determine the scale of the impacted product.”

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