PCR testing in beer: preventing your customers from drinking a ‘dud’ beer.
May 15, 2024
In newsletters to our testing customers, we tend to talk about the importance of having a regular testing programme. It’s not because we’re wanting the income stream (although that would be nice) but it’s because when you’re dealing with viruses & bacteria, if you don’t keep an eye on them, things can change very quickly. A recent example, as experienced by a customer of ours (we can’t say who as we treat all our testing customers with strict confidentiality), highlights this.
This customer is known for always producing a clean, high-quality beverage and has a regular testing programme with us. Recently a new flavoured product arrived at the lab. The usual PCR tests were run on the sample. A couple of hours later, the results came through. The sample had a phenomenally high amount of lactic acid bacteria. Not only was the sample high in lactic acid bacteria, we were able to tell our customer that it was also highly hop resistant which meant that the acids in the hops wouldn’t stand a chance of killing the lactic acid bacteria.
Now, we don’t know what our customer did with this batch but given their adherence to quality, we suspect that it was ditched. Of course, for us in the industry, we all know the story of the spoilage issue back in 2020 that affected a well-known beer brand, so here at dnature we gave a quiet nod to this customer. For them, the testing meant that their customers didn’t get to drink that beverage that tasted ‘odd’ or ‘just awful’ and were able to maintain the loyalty that their customer had towards the brand and that, is something that you can’t put a price on.
