Presenter: Rick Blankemeier, Stone Brewing Company, Escondido,
CA
With more and more craft breweries opening, the quality and
consistency of their beers comes into question. Establishing
baseline specifications using simple analytical equipment is
essential for maintaining brand and style consistency—even
for small craft breweries with limited monetary resources.
Establishing baseline specifications for core beer brands is
important to carry quality and consistency throughout the
growth of brewing capacity. The UV-Vis spectrophotometer is
an essential tool to determine empirical specifications of beer
and wort. The objective of this presentation is to introduce
smaller craft breweries to the UV-Vis spectrophotometer,
the cost of running assays, and the cost benefit of utilizing
this essential piece of analytical equipment. In addition, this
presentation will cover the specifics of bitterness, color, free
amino nitrogen, vicinal diketones, oxidative precursors, betaglucans,
and polyphenol assays and using those tests to help
optimize the brewing process and diagnose issues. Included
are studies that smaller craft breweries can use to determine
the return on investment of purchasing and utilizing a UV-Vis
spectrophotometer in their daily brewing process.
Rick Blankemeier left the world of natural gas process
engineering for the realm of craft beer and hasn’t looked back.
Rick helped establish the standard operating procedures for
QA and QC at Stone, as well as for the barrel and small-batch
program. Rick has given presentations and seminars on quality
assurance and spectrophotometry at Southern California
MBAA technical meetings and the 2013 Craft Brewers
Conference. Rick holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
chemical engineering from the University of Colorado at
Boulder. He currently works as the quality assurance analyst at
Stone Brewing Co., specializing in small-batch and barrel-aged
beer.
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