The 4th annual 2018 Pacific Northwest Local Area Brewing Science (LABS) meeting on Funky Fermentations was a huge success! 109 people gathered together on a Wednesday night to learn about beer science… What nerds! Big shout-outs to McMenamins for supporting this event and hosting it in their beautiful Mission Theater, to all of the brewers who brought beer to share with everyone (over 15 breweries were represented and over 42 different brands were available at the meeting), to the Oregon State University ASBC Student Club workers/volunteers who helped coordinate the event, and finally to the speakers for volunteering their time to share their knowledge.
To start out the night, Tom Shellhammer gave a brief introduction about the purpose of the ASBC and highlighted the upcoming ASBC events at #BrewingSummit2018. Then the first speaker, Max Kravitz (pFriem), gave a great under-the-hood look at how pFriem Family Brewers get funky in their barrel-aged beers. Kara Taylor (White Labs) followed up with a thought-provoking lecture on how brewers should care for Bret, Pedio, and Lacto cultures. To round out the night, Chris Curtin (Oregon State University) gave a brilliant talk on how the microbiome is relevant to the brewer. Who knew that is how terroir is created in barrel-aged beers? ;) On a more serious note, Chris referenced the work published by Nicholas A. Bokulich and David Mills in eLife (“Mapping Microbial Ecosystems and Spoilage-Gene Flow in Breweries Highlights Patterns of Contamination and Resistance”) as a potential strength of this type of research. Definitely worth a read if you have not seen it.
Look forward to attending the next one—see you all in 2019!
