THE BREWERY
Mother Earth Brewing Company was started in San Diego in 2010 as a family-owned and ran craft brewery. With growth, they added production in Nampa, Idaho. Today, Mother Earth operates production facilities and tap houses in California and Idaho, is sold in 20 states, and is exported to the UK, Australia, and Mexico.
With rapid scaling of production, it was important to be able to standardize the processes needed for profitable, consistent production across batches for the brewery’s flagship brands.
Director of Brewing Operations, Chris Baker was looking to add dissolved oxygen (DO) monitoring to the daily sampling process when he first looked at the Sennosystem. What he found was far more powerful than he expected—new opportunities to improve the brewing process, efficiencies, and profitability.
THE CHALLENGES
Consistency Requires Data and Insights
Fermentation monitoring is typically a manual process. Often done once or twice per day at most, manual sampling is labor intensive and prone to operator errors. Data recording is often incomplete and is rarely consistent across fermentations. Manual density measurements reveal biases and errors that occur during the actual measurement.
THE SOLUTION
Sennos Fills in the Gaps in Fermentation with Unparalleled Visibility
Sennos provides data most brewers never have access to. “I’m actually filling in a role in my brewery that I’ve never had before,” says Baker. He found the software to be intuitive and easy to use. He quickly realized that because the Sennosystem is so powerful, he didn’t need to download the data and analyze it on his own any longer. He continues, “When you think about the skill set needed to process data in Excel—you could be a blackbelt in the software and wouldn’t be able to build algorithms to this extent. I’m impressed with how powerful it made me.”
It would take a ton of time to measure what Sennos measures. It’s unrealistic for most breweries, including Mother Earth, to have the manpower to watch fermentations closely. As a brewery, we are a big proponent of consistency, but we pushed consistency as far as we could.
With Sennos in place, Baker found that he could use data well beyond his initial intent. First, with round-the-clock sampling, his team received alerts as soon as an issue occurred. Previously, when problems arose during a fermentation, it took a significant amount of time to problem solve. Now with continuous, real-time data, Baker
has been able to react more rapidly and make needed decisions. And with benchmarks, he’s able to compare each batch of the same brand and fix variations batch to batch.
THE FUTURE
With all this fermentation data at his fingertips, Baker put the information to good use. He gained a better understanding of DO uptake as he’d originally intended, but he also used the information for everything from yeast optimization to increased production volume. As yeast is transferred to the fermenter, pH is closely monitored to ensure yeast health. Using benchmark curves, he’s been able to dial in his pitch rates to ensure consistency. And by being notified of issues sooner, there’s been less production delays from things like sluggish fermentations. More consistent production schedules have led to an increase in production volumes.
This is the best tool you can have for consistent fermentations.
But it’s not just Baker watching the data. Every account at Sennos has a dedicated Customer Success Manager. For Mother Earth, Kristen Ewer owns that task. “She often notices issues before my head brewer or I can even wrap our heads around it,” notes Baker.
He advocates for more breweries benefiting from knowing what is happening in their brewery with the data Sennos provides. “If we could share more data, beer across the craft sector would improve.” The industry is already known for information sharing, but fermentation data remains an area largely unknown. Sennos takes the guesswork out of it.
I think that Sennos is an important part of the future of the craft beer industry—and the quality of beer that comes out of it.
Unlock precision and control with Sennos, and trust your data.