From shelf stability and freshness to getting a better understanding how the chemistry of your beer is affected by its environment, a brewery’s quality team is a key to making that next step for your brewery.
Many breweries shared their ideas on what they do to help make sure the best beer is going out and doubling back to check on batches that have left the premise to make sure they are of the highest quality.
Brandon Ramirez, Dust Bowl Brewing Quality Assurance Manager: To ensure shelf stability, we focus a lot of attention on the Micro program as well as monitoring oxygen levels from the time of knockout all the way until the product hits the bottle/can. Our QA department holds a stock of beer in both the cold box and an ambient temperature room so that over time taste tests (and lab tests) can be performed on beers being held in different environments. Currently, our QA department is performing research in conjunction with the Chemistry department at CSU-Stanislaus to better understand the IBU profile throughout the beer production process. The hope is to not only gain a better understanding of IBU testing by Spectrophotometry vs HPLC, but also to look at the change in the IBU profile of a beer over time as it ages in a bottle and/or can.
Max Schenk, Round Town Brewery owner/founder: We stash a QA keg out of every batch we brew. We will sit down as a group with samples from the the QA keg and samples from the new batch and look for any flaws or variations. If we do find any issues we make the necessary adjustments before the beer makes it to consumers.
Nick Garrison, Foolproof Brewing president/founder: We do ATP testing, DO testing, gravity readings, yeast viability tests, and of course…taste tests!
Riley Seitz, Surly Brewing QA/QC Manager: There are a number of ways we test the shelf stability of our brands.
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