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By Neva Parker As the new year begins, White Labs in narrowing its focus in fermentation sciences. Without changing our main objective as a production facility, we have been and will be expanding our analytical and laboratory services for the brewing and winemaking industries. Although we currently offer a wide variety of services to our customers, many are not aware that these are available. Among these are IBU and color testing, nutritional analysis, complete sample analysis and testing of yeast and finished products, identification of brewery contaminants, viability tests, ale vs. lager test, and in-house consulting with our microbiologists. New for this upcoming year will be volatile compound analysis with our PerkinElmer Gas Chromatograph-Headspace. This equipment will allow us to measure the presence and quantities of ethanol, VDKs, acetaldehyde, and sulfur compounds. With this, we also hope to further characterize our yeast strains and detect small mutations so that we can give our customers the most complete information possible. These tests will be available mid-year. Another new toy we will be playing around with a great deal this year will be our pilot brewery system. With the acquisition and trial of many new yeast strains, we will be able to create and test beer products with potentially new strains. We will be able to determine optimal parameters for these strains and monitor their performance under variable conditions before releasing them to the public. We are also planning various fermentation trials for in-house analysis such as same yeast at different temperatures, same yeast different starting gravities, same wort different yeasts, and similar tests. All of us at White Labs are excited for this upcoming year and we hope to share our knowledge with you, our valued customers. Visit us at the Craft Brewers Conference for more detailed information about these services and more! Neva Parker is lab manager for White Labs. |
