Sanitas Brewing Company’s first location is surrounded by climbing gyms, a pickleball court, and even a running shoe headquarters (what up Newton Running!), so in a place where people care about their physical health and socializing, they are going to be selective about what they choose to drink. Sanitas Brewing has a constant rotation of classic beer styles along with ones for the more adventurous souls who just finished climbing a nearby mountain, so making sure they are consistent in quality is an important consideration. In ascending their own quality “mountain”, Sanitas decided to engage Fermly in lab services:
“Lab work is a backstop to our cleaning and sanitizing processes as it allows us to have full confidence, with an outside verification, of the quality of our products,” co-founder Chris Coyne states. “Additionally, lab work is crucial in diagnosing the significance of any deviation from standard processes, either through intentional process improvement or the inevitable missteps that can happen in the chaotic world of a brewery.”
Understanding and improving on the brewing process is important, but what about when planning for a beer to leave the facility? Ensuring quality during packaging is an additional aspect that sometimes gets overlooked, but not for these wise owls:
“As we train packaging line operators to run independently of direct oversight, we have used Fermly to test dissolved oxygen (DO) of cans immediately off the packaging line,” Coyne explains. “Having on-site DO testing and direct feedback from a former brewer with knowledge of packaging operations has rapidly sped up the feedback loop, allowing us to learn what settings and conditions result in the lowest DO and thus the best quality product.”
All of this lab testing and on-site presence can sound expensive, but Sanitas takes advantage of the Fermly subscription model to get discounts from the start, and it has been budget-friendly with the ability to roll over testing!
“Monthly billing for a predetermined amount of tests has made the budgeting of costs for our accounting team easier,” Coyne notes. “The flexibility of a few extra tests one month and fewer in the future means I don’t have to ration testing.”
Quality testing without a person on staff to discuss and interpret the results and how to improve processes makes the data not actionable. Coyne says it best when describing how the Fermly team shows up:
“To start, they are wonderful people who clearly care about those around them and the brewing community they are part of,” Coyne emphasizes. “But more practically, the value of any lab testing is not in the results but the interpretation of those results. Knowing what is meaningful and what is inconsequential is the real value of a lab professional.”
Sanitas reveals itself to be a brewery committed to quality and innovation. By leveraging the expertise, personnel, and results provided by Fermly, they can know for certain that they are delivering exceptional products to their customers. Sips to science as this partnership underscores the importance of precision, expertise, and community in the ever-evolving craft brewing industry.
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