Apogee Brewing: Gold medal winning beer with PLAATO
Enhancing Quality and Consistency with PLAATO
A look inside Lucy Loves Rye, the gold winner at GABF
Apogee Brewing, a California-based craft brewery, is unique in its team of retired aerospace engineers with a passion for brewing high-quality, primarily Belgian-style ales. Their focus on quality has earned them prestigious awards, including a recent gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their Lucy Loves Rye Saison. Apogee Brewing uses the PLAATO Pro to monitor their fermentations and ensure high quality across their recipes. Let’s explore their fermentation profile and see how PLAATO’s real-time monitoring enabled Apogee to craft its award-winning brew.
Apogee Brewing prioritizes precision and consistency in its brewing process. Jeff, Owner and Brew Master, highlights the importance of temperature control, particularly for their signature Belgian styles:
"In the brewing process for Belgian ales and some of our pilsners, temperature is an integral part of the fermentation process. And knowing when to modify the temperature."
Traditional methods of monitoring fermentation, such as manual sampling and temperature checks, can be time-consuming and prone to error, making it difficult to ensure consistent quality across batches. Apogee Brewing needed a reliable solution to monitor fermentation in real-time and has been a customer of PLAATO since 2022. They use PLAATO Pro to:
Enhanced quality control and work towards consistent batches
Accurately track fermentation activity
Detect deviations from the desired temperature profile and intervene if necessary
Optimize the timing of critical brewing steps, such as sugar additions and temperature adjustments with PLAATO recipe alerts.
Award winning beer
Specifically, the gold medal-winning "Lucy Loves Rye" exemplifies the benefits of PLAATO Pro. Real-time data allowed the brewers to identify a low-alcohol trend during fermentation and make timely sugar additions to achieve the desired ABV and create an award-winning beer. Jeff explains:
"PLAATO alerted me fermentation started to drop off, I was way low on alcohol. So right then, I added more Belgian candy sugar.... I kicked another fermentation off of it to drive the alcohol up a little bit and it really worked. I mean, we won a gold medal for it"
Similarly, Jeff has achieved consistent fermentation profiles with "Monks in Space" demonstrating PLAATO Pro’s effectiveness in ensuring repeatability and predictable results, while being able to experiment on newer recipes. Jeff has been a beta user of our newest feature PLAATO Benchmarks to focus on driving even more consistency in fermentation between batches.
A huge congratulations from the entire PLAATO team on your outstanding achievements at the Great American Beer Festival!
Your dedication, craft, and passion for brewing have truly shone through, and these awards are a testament to the hard work and innovation you bring to the industry. We're proud to be part of your journey and can't wait to see what you'll accomplish next. Here's to continued success and more well-deserved recognition in the future! Cheers!
