The quality panel at CBC 2017

There’s no shame in dumping substandard beer and it should be done as early as possible in the brewingprocess, according to a beer quality expert.

Beer gets more and more expensive as production progresses, Mary Pellettieri advised brewers at the Craft Brewers Conference.

“Think about it when you’re at the mash tun… if this doesn’t look right, I’d rather dump it there than wait until it’s in the fermenter and we have so many more man hours on [it],” she said.

A quality manager who has worked for breweries including Goose Island and MillerCoors, Pellettieri is the author of Quality Management: Essential Planning for Breweries.

“If you want to just do a cost analysis of what the beer costs by the time you get it to the packaging line, it’s very expensive,” she said.

“You’ve got more man hours, you’ve got much more materials. If it’s not perfect there, stop it before it gets there.

“There’s no shame in dumping beer… every brewer has to do it,” Pellettieri said.

Can’t afford quality?
Also on the beer quality panel was Larry Horowitz ofFour String Brewing Company, who had cautionary words for brewers who claim a quality program is not within their budget.

“People who say they ‘can’t afford a quality program’: My thought about that is, you’re going to pay for it one way or another, if you plan for it you’re going to pay less,” he said.

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