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Gearhead: Keeping an Eye on a Brewery’s Microscopic Workforce

For a price, automated cell counters can save valuable lab time otherwise spent peering into microscopes and counting manually.

John M. Verive Jun 24, 2020 - 9 min read

Gearhead: Keeping an Eye on a Brewery’s Microscopic Workforce Primary Image

Zach Bodah uses a Nexcelom Cellometer to automate cell counting at Allagash Brewing.

Today’s breweries have a lot of specialized hardware, and in this column, we’ve looked at many examples of the machines that make craft beer possible. But we haven’t yet looked closely at the smallest and most important machines in the brewery: the yeast.

Those single-celled microorganisms do all the heavy lifting. Sure, there are brewers sweating over hot mash tuns and brew kettles and cellarmen humping kegs from dock to cold box, but at the end of the shift, those guys and gals clock out and go to sleep. Yeast don’t sleep until the job is done, and it’s a job the fungi seem purpose-built for: breaking apart saccharides and reassembling the carbon’s atoms into intoxicating (to us) ethanol. It’s the critical task in wort’s transformation into beer, and it all happens at the cellular level. How do brewers monitor and evaluate this tiny, essential workforce?

“The yeast talks,” says Max Kravitz, quality-control lab manager at pFriem Family Brewers in Hood River, Oregon. “And it’s important to have a relationship with your yeast.”

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