Find what's quietly costing you batches — in one week.
A fermentation operations diagnostic for breweries, cideries, and distilleries — run by a former New Belgium Microbiology Yeast Specialist who spent seven years there, helped build its Asheville brewery, and now builds brewery data systems. I go through your process and the batch data you already keep, find the problems before they cost you another tank, and hand you a fix list ranked by what each one is worth. $1,500 flat. You decide if the findings were worth it — if they weren't, you don't pay.
The problem isn't that you don't know your process. It's that nobody has time to look.
You're running batches. Your cellar log lives in a spreadsheet, or three spreadsheets, or a clipboard by the tanks. You already suspect where it's soft — the attenuation that drifts a few points and nobody can say why, the fermenter that always runs a degree warm, the yeast you're repitching a generation or two past where you should, the DO pickup at transfer you've never actually measured.
But suspecting isn't knowing. And knowing isn't the same as having it written down, ranked by cost, and fixed. So it doesn't get fixed. You find out a batch drifted after it's already in the tank. The loss gets folded into “that's brewing,” and everyone goes back to running the next one.
That gap — between what your numbers could tell you and what anyone on your team has time to pull out of them — is where the money leaks out of a brewery. Quietly, one batch at a time.
What the diagnostic is
One week. I take everything you already track — brew sheets, cellar logs, QC records, fermentation profiles, whatever form they're in — plus a walk through your process, and I find what's costing you product. Then you get:
A findings report
Every problem I found, in plain language, each with an honest estimate of what it's costing you per year.
A prioritized fix list
Ranked by payoff, so you know exactly what to do first, what can wait, and what to ignore.
A 90-minute walkthrough
In person or by call — where I take you through all of it and answer everything. You keep every document.
No software to install. No retainer to sign. No disruption to your team's week. I work from the records you already keep and hand you something you can act on the same day.
What a diagnostic typically turns up
These are the kinds of things I look for — not claimed results, but the failure modes that hide in a working brewery's data:
Yeast pitched by habit instead of by viable cell count — under- or over-pitching that shows up later as attenuation drift, sluggish starts, or off-flavors. (It's why I built the free pitch-rate and viability calculators — this is that thinking, applied to your operation.)
Repitching tired yeast a generation or two too far because nobody's tracking viability or generation count — the invisible cause of “why was that batch different?”
A fermenter or two running off-target on temperature and nobody catching it until the ester or fusel profile shows up in the glass.
Crash and dump timing run on the calendar instead of on gravity — dropping bright too early, or losing yeast you could have repitched.
Tank utilization gaps — a fermenter sitting empty two days a turn is lost production you're paying rent and payroll on.
DO pickup at transfer or packaging quietly cutting shelf life — stale beer, returns, and dumped inventory you can't trace to a cause.
I rank whatever I find by what it's costing you, so the report is a sequence to work through — not a wish list.
How the week works
A free 30-minute scoping call. You tell me your setup and what's been nagging you. I tell you honestly whether a diagnostic will find enough to be worth your money. If it won't, I'll say so on the call — that's the whole point of it being free.
You send me what you've got. Logs, sheets, records, photos of a whiteboard. Messy is fine. Gaps are often exactly where the finding is.
I dig for a week. Your process and your data. Your team loses none of its time.
The walkthrough. I hand you the report and the fix list and walk you through all of it. Done.
Who's doing this
I spent seven years at New Belgium Brewing as a Microbiology Yeast Specialist — the person watching the living half of your process, the yeast that makes or breaks a batch. I started in Fort Collins and moved to Asheville as one of the seed employees who built the brewery here, and across all seven years the throughline was the same: find the small failures before they take out a whole batch. Then I left to run my own gourmet fermentation farm and learned the rest of the lessons at my own expense. Now I build the data and monitoring systems I wish we'd had, for operations your size.
I'm not coming to teach you how to brew — you know that better than I do. I'm coming to do the one thing that never gets done because everyone's too busy running batches: sit with your process and your numbers until the quiet problems have names, a rank, and a dollar value.
You decide whether the findings were worth the fee. If you decide they weren't, email me and I refund everything, deposit included — no argument, no clawback of the report.
The risk sits with me, because you haven't worked with me before and it shouldn't sit with you.
$1,500, flat. One week.
Half to book, the balance when I hand you the report. No hourly meter, no scope creep, no surprise invoice.
For context: one dumped batch costs more than this diagnostic. So does a month of an attenuation problem you can't see. So does a fermenter sitting empty half the week.
I do these one at a time, by hand — about two a month. When those are booked, they're booked.
Common questions
“I already know where my problems are.”
You know where some of them are. The value isn't a stranger explaining your own brewery to you — it's the outside pass that names the soft spots, ranks them by dollars, and hands you the fix, so the thing you've been meaning to get to for six months is finally written down and prioritized. A fresh set of eyes on your own data almost always turns up at least one thing you'd stopped seeing.
“My data's a mess.”
Normal. I work with whatever you have — spreadsheets, brew sheets, paper, a photo of the tank-side whiteboard. The gaps in your records are frequently where the losses hide, so a mess isn't a problem for me. It's often the first finding.
“How do I know you won't just tell me things I can't use?”
Two reasons. The fix list is ranked by payoff, so you get a sequence, not a lecture. And the guarantee: if it isn't worth the fee in your judgment, you don't pay it.
“Is my information confidential?”
Yes. I'll sign your NDA, or send you mine. Nothing I see leaves the engagement, ever.
“What if I want you to build the fix?”
Some people do — a live dashboard of every active batch against target, alerting before a batch goes sideways, automation on top of the data you already keep. That's a separate conversation and a separate quote. The diagnostic stands entirely on its own; you're never obligated to go further.
Book the scoping call
Thirty minutes. No slides, no pressure, no obligation. You tell me your setup; I tell you straight whether this is worth your $1,500. If it is, we book the week. If it isn't, you've spent thirty minutes and gotten an honest answer from someone who's stood in a cellar.
The risk sits with me, because you haven't worked with me before and it shouldn't sit with you.