Aug 11, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min · 15 segments
From the Between Two Fermenters Archives, one of our favourites.... “My beers are the portfolio of my life.” In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome Luc ‘Bim’ Lafontaine, the mastermind behind…
Luc LafontaineGuest
Troy BurchHostCole Rayscombs
It's time for another edition of Cole's Notes with Cole Rayscombs, GLB's Quality Assurance Lab Supervisor.
This week, we're going to dive into how we find out what is really growing in our beer.
On previous episodes, I've spoken about the many antimicrobial properties of beer and that we're constantly monitoring them for infection.
But how do we know when a beer is infected? The contaminating organisms involved are generally too small for us to see with the naked eye.
And we can't ask them what they are, so how do we identify them? Today, I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain into how we are monitoring our fermentations for microscopic beasties.
In our beer making process, we have multiple points that are considered to have the highest risk for potential contamination, which we call critical control points.
These critical control points generally revolve around us moving beer from one vessel to another or adding ingredients such as fruit or other adjuncts to our beer.
We take a small sample of beer at each of these critical control points and bring it back to the lab for testing.
In the lab, we start by putting a very small volume of the beer sample on a petri dish filled with a gelatinous substance called agar, or as I like to call it, the forbidden jello.
Each of these forbidden jello plates has a variety of antibiotics which selectively kill certain microorganisms, as well as other indicators which can help us narrow down what's likely growing in our samples.
We take this array of plates and grow them in an incubator for 48 to 72 hours, and then we look at what has grown.
Remember earlier when I said that microorganisms were too small for us to see with our naked eye? Well, when they grow on our agar plates, they form these visible clusters of cells called colonies.
Based on the size, shape, color, number, and what it did and didn't grow on, we can narrow down what sort of microbial colony we're looking at.
However, this process isn't perfect, as there is sometimes overlap in the markers for what could or couldn't be growing.
Luckily, we have a few other methods to gain more information, such as gram staining, where we take a variety of dyes to stain the cells based on their membrane, and PCR, where we take the DNA of our microbe and copy it a bunch of times until we can measure certain genetic markers.
These are just a few ways that we can use the ingenuity of science to see the invisible world.
It's time for another edition of Cole's Notes with Cole Rayscombs, GLB's Quality Assurance Lab Supervisor.
This week, we're going to dive into how we find out what is really growing in our beer.
On previous episodes, I've spoken about the many antimicrobial properties of beer and that we're constantly monitoring them for infection.
But how do we know when a beer is infected? The contaminating organisms involved are generally too small for us to see with the naked eye.
And we can't ask them what they are, so how do we identify them? Today, I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain into how we are monitoring our fermentations for microscopic beasties.
In our beer making process, we have multiple points that are considered to have the highest risk for potential contamination, which we call critical control points.
These critical control points generally revolve around us moving beer from one vessel to another or adding ingredients such as fruit or other adjuncts to our beer.
We take a small sample of beer at each of these critical control points and bring it back to the lab for testing.
In the lab, we start by putting a very small volume of the beer sample on a petri dish filled with a gelatinous substance called agar, or as I like to call it, the forbidden jello.
Each of these forbidden jello plates has a variety of antibiotics which selectively kill certain microorganisms, as well as other indicators which can help us narrow down what's likely growing in our samples.
We take this array of plates and grow them in an incubator for 48 to 72 hours, and then we look at what has grown.
Remember earlier when I said that microorganisms were too small for us to see with our naked eye? Well, when they grow on our agar plates, they form these visible clusters of cells called colonies.
Based on the size, shape, color, number, and what it did and didn't grow on, we can narrow down what sort of microbial colony we're looking at.
However, this process isn't perfect, as there is sometimes overlap in the markers for what could or couldn't be growing.
Luckily, we have a few other methods to gain more information, such as gram staining, where we take a variety of dyes to stain the cells based on their membrane, and PCR, where we take the DNA of our microbe and copy it a bunch of times until we can measure certain genetic markers.
These are just a few ways that we can use the ingenuity of science to see the invisible world.
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