Quality Control: Starting Up (and Sizing Up) Your Brewery’s Own Lab

So, you know you’re ready to start growing your brewery lab—but it can be intimidating. Which tests are the most important to focus on? Which pieces of equipment are crucial? And most importantly, why are they so expensive?!

First of all, relax: The nice thing about starting a brewery lab is that there are no set rules for how it needs to be run. In this industry, we’re lucky in that we have less of the oversight and regulations that can often limit labs in other industries. Your brewery can start a lab and grow it at whatever pace feels appropriate. However, every brewery, no matter its size, should focus on quality testing. Here, we’ll share some guidelines that can be used to get started with testing and equipment.

A quick disclaimer: These points are merely suggestions based on your brewery’s annual production volume. As owner or brewer, you can choose to implement tests based on your brewery’s different priorities at any given time. If budgetary restrictions are a big issue, you can start slow and implement tests later. On the other hand, if you’re rapidly expanding, or you’ve already encountered some quality issues, you may want to implement some of these tests sooner.

Regardless, as long as you’re prioritizing quality in your growing brewery, you are on the right track.

Growth Can Change the Equation

You already know the importance of quality testing in your brewery. However, there are many phases that growing breweries might not be aware of when it comes to the importance of lab testing.

[PAYWALL] The increase in quality concerns and consistency issues are directly correlated with increasing brewing volume. Why? As with anything, growth results in things becoming more expensive. That can result in budget cuts elsewhere.

Let’s say you’d like to hire another brewer or cellar person, but you aren’t quite at that point yet. Your current brewer might become overwhelmed with the workload and make a mistake, such as forgetting to sanitize a hose. That may result in a micro-infection that gets to the final product before it presents itself as an off-flavor, ultimately requiring a recall. Instead of waiting for something bad to happen, implementing quality tests as you grow can be a wiser path.

Another quality concern with growing breweries is distribution conditions. As you begin to package your beer and send it out to farther locations, you can’t be certain of the temperature or transport parameters once your product leaves the facility. Having these quality checks in place before you begin that phase will help you to ensure that the customer receives a consistent product, regardless of where they buy it.

The Baseline

Before we get into the test and equipment breakdowns based on your brewery’s production, I want to go over some basic equipment and tools that all breweries should have, regardless of their current lab status.

Two of the main items that every brewery should employ are a density meter (or hydrometer) and a pH meter. These tools should be used on every brew day and over the course of fermentation.

Besides those two, here are some miscellaneous items that you can begin to order and collect as you think about starting your lab: gloves, disposable pipettes, graduated cylinders, Erlenmeyer flasks, and plastic sampling bottles. You can purchase many of these items online, including the glassware, for a reasonable price. Having these articles in place before you begin testing will let you get the ball rolling right away.

Now, let’s begin with the first category of brewery production volume.

Fewer than 1,000 Barrels per Year

Within this range, your brewery should already have two main lab-related measures under your belt: forced diacetyl tests and the beginnings of a sensory panel.

Forced diacetyl is a test that can give you or your brewers insight into beer sensory and yeast health with minimal effort and cost. During a diacetyl rest, many brewers monitor their yeast and crash their tank after a certain number of days. However, the best method for determining when the yeast are done clearing up diacetyl is to smell and taste it. The forced diacetyl test is a way to “force” the diacetyl out of solution faster, to get an idea whether the compound is still present in detectable concentrations. Heating the sample and comparing it to a control sample allows you to determine whether diacetyl is still present, and whether the yeast still need time to clean it up. A thermometer and water bath allow you to quickly heat up your sample for the correct amount of time. Then, you can place it along with the control sample in the refrigerator to cool down before performing sensory.

When it comes to starting your sensory panel, that refrigerator becomes dual-purpose. Storing cans, bottles, or crowlers from every run in the fridge and having employees perform regular tastings is a great way to begin accumulating true-to-brand data. This is also valuable training, getting your employees started on what to look for in each brand, so they can help make sure the beer is up to standard for release.

Having these regular tastings to compare fresh beer to “hot shelf” samples also gives your brewers and other employees valuable insight into how a beer ages over time, and it can help you decide whether to take measures to improve shelf life. The “hot shelf” doesn’t need to be a hot area of the brewery, but room temperature or a bit warmer is ideal. You can then put these samples in the refrigerator at predetermined windows, so you can compare to fresh versions at the same temperature.

Between 1,000 and 5,000 Barrels per Year

Ironically, perhaps, this is the size where breweries need to start thinking in smaller terms—microscopic, that is. This is when it’s time for yeast health and unwanted brewery microbes to be a greater focus of quality testing.

Performing yeast counts and beginning to plate for detection of microorganisms will help to save money on yeast, prevent dumped batches, and improve consistency among batches.

Yeast health and cell counting become crucial during this phase of a brewery’s growth. While the jump to liquid yeast from dry yeast can be intimidating, it will ultimately save you money and create better beers. Performing cell counts on every pitch and harvest will tell you ahead of time exactly how much yeast to pitch and whether the yeast are going to perform the way you want them to.

Here’s the equipment you need for cell counting: a microscope, hemocytometer, pipettes, and tubes or vessels for measurement and mixing.

This is a test that requires accurate measurements, so the pipettes are important. However, the microscope and hemocytometer will be the pricier items on this list. I won’t go into the method for cell counting because there are many resources available to help brewers get started with this. But it’s a good habit to be in once you’ve reached this size.

The other micro-investment will be to monitor your beers for microorganisms besides brewer’s yeast. These can include unwanted Lactobacillus and Pediococcus, beer- and wort-spoilage organisms, and wild yeast. This category of testing can be intimidating for someone without a science background, but you can start with the easy media types and work your way up from there.

For example, HLP media—that’s Hsu’s Lactobacillus and Pediococcus media—are what you can use to test for those microbes. They’re also the most user-friendly media for brewers when it comes to making your own plates and tubes. HLP media don’t require the use of an autoclave—just a hot plate to heat up the media, and tubes with caps to store the media. Once you’ve made the tubes, you can inoculate them with wort, fermenting beer, or finished product. You’ll need to store these in an incubator or warm area and to check the tubes daily to see whether anything has grown.

Once you get some experience with HLP media, the next step up would be to invest in a pressure cooker or autoclave, so you can use other media types. When making plates, you usually need to sterilize the media through the proper temperature and pressure conditions before pouring the plates. However, the upside to this is that you’ll be able to identify more types of wild yeast and bacteria that could result in off-flavors and/or exploding cans.

Between 5,000 and 20,000 Barrels per Year

This is a wide size range, but the tests outlined here can be critical when it comes to taking your brewery’s quality to the next level. These tests also require some additional safety standards, so a chemical fume hood will be important.

The other pieces of equipment will include a centrifuge, spectrophotometer, shaker, and distillation setup.

While this is the most expensive category, the data that come from this equipment are extremely important for your beer’s consistency. Using the spectrophotometer, shaker, and centrifuge, you can test for IBUs and SRM together. These tests can help you save money on raw materials while ensuring that your color and bitterness aren’t drifting too far from batch to batch or over the course of years.

The next test, which also involves the spectrophotometer, is VDK testing. Rather than relying on a sensory test for forced diacetyl, this test involves a distillation step before the chemical reaction, and having quantitative diacetyl concentrations can help you make better decisions about your beer and yeast health. Finally, you can also use the distillation equipment for ABV testing, to ensure that you’re properly labeling your core brands—as well as your one-off barrel projects, for which it can be tricky to calculate ABV.

Besides those tests, it’s crucial to take the next steps in your sensory panel training. If you haven’t already, invest in off-flavor spikes that can be used to train your staff. Your sensory panel members become real assets to your brewery once they’re able to identify what’s wrong with beers out in the market, helping the team to determine the root cause of an issue. This involves an investment of time each week to set up the panel and go through the exercises with the panel members.

Quality at Any Scale

Granted, this is a lot of information, and some of it might not be pertinent to your brewery yet. So, save this article for later, and you can look back and have an idea of what the next steps may be in your journey toward higher quality.

Also, “growth” may mean something different for your brewery. It doesn’t have to mean getting bigger if your goal is to build a sustainable business and repeat clientele as your beer grows in quality and consistency.

Whatever your brewery’s path, implementing these tests at the right time can be critical to setting it apart from the competition, ensuring opportunities for steady growth in the years to come.