How do you know how much beer to make, and when it needs to be available? Which beer needs to be transferred to which tank? You don’t want beer sitting in tanks taking up valuable real estate if you don’t have kegs or cans to put the beer into. You need enough malt to make beer and enough cans to fill with beer, but you also have a limited amount of space in the brewery. It can be hard to anticipate future needs of the brewery and balance that with employee work schedules, truck deliveries and pickups, unforeseen canning line issues, supplier delays, product demand, etc. The brewers/packaging team start their day a few hours before me so Ja Rule is already blasting as I sit down to review the schedule and plan out my day in the lab.Ī well thought out, detailed schedule can make a huge impact on the day-to-day operations of a brewery. I fill my coffee mug and head into the lab. I start every morning basically the same. In this series of articles, Amy Todd, owner and operator of Zymurgy Labs, a third-party beer testing lab, who also works part-time in the lab at Zero Gravity Craft Brewery, gives us a detailed ground-floor view of the day-to-day lab routines that separate quality craft breweries from the pack.

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