Brewing Quality Control – What, When, Where and How

Why Quality Control is Important

In a competitive marketplace, assuring the quality and consistency of the beers you are brewing becomes increasingly important. Many factors can influence the outcome of your finished beer such as; malt, hops, yeast, liquor profile, process temperatures and times (e.g. mashing, fermentation and conditioning).

Monitoring important parameters across your process and in your final product will help to dial-in product specifications and improve batch to batch consistency.

Having a basic laboratory setup is enough to get started and as you grow you can also develop your lab to produce more data that can help troubleshoot issues, identify seasonal changes in hops or malt and maximise efficiencies of process and/or ingredient usage, potentially saving you time and money.

What to Measure?

As a minimum you should be looking for good process control measuring times, temperatures and pH at most if not all stages of production.

In finished beer, %ABV, IBU, colour and pH are a good starting point as you look to maintain brew to brew consistency.

Other useful tests include diacetyl (VDKs) informing you when beer can be taken off the yeast or cooled, transferred etc. and fermentable sugars to measure wort fermentability and your mash efficiency.

Finally, microbiological checks for beer spoilage bacteria, diastatic yeast and/or other wild yeasts should be performed on finished beer prior to packaging at the very least. This is particularly important if you are packaging into small-pack options (cans and bottles). Performing these checks prior to packaging can help prevent wastage of further materials and labour.

How to Measure

Initially a brewer should have access to calibrated thermometer probes, a robust pH meter, a method of measuring gravities and a microscope for checking the yeast and performing cell counts.

As the brewery develops so should the laboratory capability. QCL can help advise you in this area. We have been supplying laboratories for 40 years and currently support around 100 breweries across the UK and Ireland.

The BeerLab allows you to test many key parameters in beer, wort and water (liquor).

17/01/2026