Lab?

[brewer_22]

i come from a large brewery where we had a lab to to all our testing for QC. I was wondering what brew pubs or other brewerys to to test thier yest and beer? do they take samples and send them away or just cross thier fingers and hope that there sanitation practices are perfect. I would rather not function my brewery that way so any insight would help.
Cheers,

-Nate-

[sleeper]

My lab equip

mircoscope, hemocytometer (spelling), methyl blue, PH meter, DO meter, auger plates/incubator. That will get you a long way IMHO.

Cheers!

Levi

[william.heinric]

Qa/qc

Breweries have a multitude of programs in place. I've seen everything from the "cross your fingers" approach for a brewpub to massive QA/QC programs for the bigger breweries with cash and enough sense use it on consistency. It really becomes a question of necessary longevity for the beer (for a brewpub, it may only be three weeks) and the desire to grow the brewery (for a packaging brewer, QA helps to ensure consistent results).

I think that a good starting program can be made with the equipment that sleeper mentioned. I've worked in a lab with less than that, but I think that you could make a good shot at checking a large number of necessary parameters with that gear. Just don't forget things like a lab-grade scale, saccharometers or hydrometers, good SOPs and statistical methods, record-keeping, and swabs to determine the efficacy of your SOPs. The nice thing is that SOPs, records, and stats are all easy on the wallet as you can create them with a pad of paper.

Good luck.

Bill

[Sulfur]

medium

Well, I occasionally look at my yeast under a microscope. That is of limited use unless you use a medium, incubate, and then look. Looking without anreicherung (concentrating?) will only tell you after it's too late i.e. the yeast is plumb full of rods. If you're concerned about multiple generations of a yeast, and you have a slow turnaround on the beer, it would make sense to practice QA.