FOCUS ON RESEARCH
Craft brewery toasts CIFT expansion into fermentation There was a time when Bob Lawrence sent samples of the P.E.I. Brewing Company’s award-winning beers to Chicago. It wasn’t, he explains, an attempt to tap into a lucrative market; it was strictly for product analysis. “We’re a craft brewery and we don’t have the equipment on site to analyze things such as IBU, alcohol content or the colour of our beer,” says the company’s senior vice president of operations. “It was the closest lab we could access, and it was rather cumbersome and expensive to send alcohol across the border for testing. I thought there had to be a better way to do this.” Then, in December 2013 came welcome news for Lawrence via a visit from Dalhousie’s Dean of Engineering, Dr. Joshua Leon. Dr. Leon informed him that the university’s Canadian Institute of Fisheries Technology (CIFT) had expanded into fermentation services for the region’s rapidly growing craft brewery, wine and cider industries. “He was asking what kind of expertise we were looking for and the services
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they could provide. I said, ‘if you’ve got the ability and the methodologies to do this analysis in Halifax, that’d be great.’ Soon after, I was sending samples to Dr. Andrew Macintosh at CIFT and he was sending the results back.” A biological engineer and assistant professor in the department of Process Engineering and Applied Science, Dr. Macintosh’s hiring was a key step in CIFT’s expansion into fermentation services. He first became interested in the process while earning his master’s degree, exploring the production of antibiotics through fermentation. That experience inspired him to earn his PhD, examining the role of carbon dioxide during standard brewing operations. “What fascinates me about fermentation is that it’s both an art and a science. We’ve taken advantage of it since the dawn of civilization, we’ve studied it thoroughly and yet there’s still so much we don’t fully know about it.” Even so, what Dr. Macintosh and his colleagues do know about the process will be vital in helping Atlantic Canada’s
craft beer industry grow. With CIFT’s expanding focus, small breweries now have ready access to the same kind of analytical expertise and equipment that large scale brewers have built into their operations, all without having to make costly investments. They can monitor water pH to see how it impacts the quality and consistency of their product. They can even take advantage of a pilot brewing operation to experiment with new products and recipes says Dr. Allan Paulson, CIFT’s director, who led the Institute’s expansion. “If they want to try a different fermentation process, yeast, grains or hops, we can do it on a small enough scale so that they can take more chances on innovative products and it won’t cost them much time or money, or tie up their production facilities.” That’s something Lawrence would eventually be interested in. Right now, he’s happy that he can get analysis of the company’s beers with a frequency that wouldn’t have been possible if he were still using the lab in Chicago.
Spencer Gallant, P.E.I. Brewing Company, is shown hopping the brew kettle.