Dana Garves Oral History Interview, February 19, 2016

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Okay, go ahead.

DANA GARVES: Uh hi. I'm Dana Garves. It is February 19, 2016 and we are sitting in the first rendition of BrewLab, a tiny little beer analysis company that I started in my garage, or half of my garage. And this is it.

TEM: This is it. This company started in 2014?

DG: Yeah. So I left Ninkasi in early October, in 2014 and at that point it had kind of already been a brain child. Something that was knocking around in my head for a while and I made the leap to leave Ninkasi, which was terrifying because it's a great company to work for and a very steady job and started applying for business loans, wrote out my business plan, contacted a few people 00:01:00in the industry being like hey would you be interested if this was something I could provide and it just [doorbell rings-Tiah and Dana laugh].

TEM: That was an opportunity.

DG: Those might be samples. Let's see-I actually got funding in December from a small bank here that gave business loans to Falling Sky and there's one other brewery that it has worked with, so it was a bank that was aware of the industry. Because a couple of the banks I talked to and tried to get loans through just had no idea, like who cares about beer? I'm like well you're not paying attention are you? This is a huge industry and it's taking off and we're in the epicenter. The bank that I did end up working with I didn't need to explain anything. They were like here you go, this is what you need, blah, blah, blah sign papers. It was in and out in less than an hour. Up to that point, all 00:02:00the banks I had been dealing with were like no, here's why. I'm like you don't understand the beer industry is exploding right now. They need this. Lab equipment's expensive, you know, and hiring a lab staff is expensive and breweries really, really hold onto their budget as much as they can just in case a part breaks or a bottling line goes down or whatever. Saving money is a big deal for these really small breweries. That was something that I worked into my plan. Well, looking at all these other companies, why aren't they being used more? They're pretty well-used like White Labs and Brewing and Distilling Analytical Services-Gary, he's over in Kentucky. Cool dude. Why aren't they being used? There were a few things that stood out to me, the first being their 00:03:00websites were terrible to navigate. I don't know. that might be a really horrible thing to say but it's something everyone can fix, so I'm not too bad about saying that. The websites were really hard to navigate and the prices were really expansive, really expensive. If you know anything about how chemical analysis works, especially in beer, you know that the upfront cost is the most expensive and then running the tests after that are pretty cheap to do. Why are they charging these small little breweries $100 to do an ABV analysis. It's absurd.

TEM: You would compare the follow-up comparison test, because you already have the baseline?

DG: Yeah.

TEM: Okay.

DG: Just the more effort I put into the research and the more I dug into what it 00:04:00was I wanted to provide, the more clear BrewLab became. I called it BrewLab for the first couple months but it was a placeholder. I was like I don't really like that name. I'm not going to stick with it. I'll come up with something better, and everyone, all my closest friends and family were just like, Dana, BrewLab's great. Isn't that what it is? That's what it is.

TEM: Be careful what you start with.

DG: Yeah. First impressions.

TEM: Have you always had an interest in chemistry? DG: Yeah, actually. I always enjoyed science and math in elementary school and early education. It was interesting to me, but I was one of those people that excelled at pretty much everything. All my grades were good without a whole lot of effort.

It was eighth grade, Mrs. O'Connor's class, she made us memorize the first 20 elements on the periodic table. The memorization part sucked, of course, that was terrible. Why would you ever make an eighth grader do that? That's useless information. But when we got into the part where there's patterns in the periodic table and there's so many patterns in the periodic table, I was just like this is awesome. I don't really understand it, but it's awesome. This is really cool. I always thought the periodic table was this enigma, like-who knows what's going on on that poster over there. Once I started to realize there's a method to the madness of it. That realization hit me in the eighth grade. It was just like this is cool. I got really into the science. I moved into high school and joined the science Olympiad team and had a really good time. honestly, chemistry was the hardest class. I had, my worst grades were in chemistry. It 00:06:00was so hard. But I think that's what I really liked about it. I struggled constantly to understand what was going on and I don't know the passion was really important in those key moments. I remember in... well, I'll tell you an interesting anecdote. I joined the science Olympiad team and my first year in high school and in Seattle where I grew up junior high was seventh, eighth, ninth and then high school was tenth, eleventh, twelfth grade. You start as a sophomore in high school. My first year in high school I joined the science Olympiad team. Didn't really tell my parents about it. Then the second year I became the president. I was running this thing and my parents had no idea and I think it was senior that I finally had to tell my mom, not only am I in the 00:07:00science Olympiad but I'm also the president and can you chaperone our next event. I was a little nervous telling my parents that I was into science.

TEM: Where do you think that came from? What was-?

DG: Honestly I think it's just that I was a girl in science and even in the science Olympiad there was only one other girl with me and science was never really a huge thing in our house. It was interesting but we always went out and played basketball and threw a football around. We were much more active and less nerdy. I think, I mean, it's totally in my head. My parents were really supportive and have been. I was just nervous to tell them I was president of a science club.

TEM: What was it like being in the school having science be your thing? I think 00:08:00we make assumptions about the progressiveness of the West Coast, and being in Seattle, we can make an even higher assumption about gender progressiveness, but-

DG: I was in the international baccalaureate program, which is similar to the AP program but it's worldwide instead of just national and I was in this insulated bubble. We called ourselves the nerd herd. We didn't care what was cool or not and so the guys and this girl Rachel that was in the club with me it never was a thing. My gender didn't matter. Was it obvious that we were different? Yeah, but it didn't matter. I guess it was progressive in that way. I never once felt 00:09:00discriminated against or treated differently. It was senior year I was walking down the hall with one of my friends and we were getting, I can't remember exactly the situation, but we were getting some chemicals for a reaction. In this conversation with a guy from the club that I basically decided, I'm going to major in chemistry for college. I was bouncing between physics and chemistry and astronomy. I know I want to go into science, what one? It was just talking about chemicals with this guy was the moment. I was like, alright this is what I'm going to do. This has been the hardest class I've ever taken. It's insanely rewarding on the lab bench when you get an experiment right and the results prove it. It was that moment, I was like chemistry, that's it.

TEM: I have the assumption that part of what's cool about chemistry is that there's creativity that's built into it too.

DG: There is.

TEM: Do you have other, I don't know, do you feel like you were a creative kid or a creative teen?

DG: No actually. I mean, you know, in the popular ways that kids are. My brothers and I make believe and play games and put on little plays or performances for my parents or grandparents, whoever's visiting. I never-art wasn't a huge deal. Creativity-wise, in early teachings of chemistry you don't really give someone ability to be creative. That's just danger waiting to happen.

TEM: Point taken.

DG: You don't really get into the creative part of chemistry until college and even then not until your second or third year when you're working with a research professor and they loosen your leash a little bit. It is important to be creative and have creative solutions when problems arise and think outside of the box and think okay this problem happened. I didn't predict that it would happen. Here's what's happening, how can I steer it back? I think that creative problem solving is probably where the creativity comes in. figuring out how to get everything back on track, get it to where you need it to be, or to explain what happened. Maybe you figure out there was a problem after the experiment's done running. Well, how did we get there? Where was there a mess up. Look back 00:12:00through your notes. Did I take good notes? You know. there's so many aspects to chemistry that I think are challenging and fun and just, I don't know. something about it. Putting two things together and knowing their molecules are interacting in ways that I can't see but I do understanding. There's something almost magical about it. Maybe that's a little cliché, but I think it's cool. It's really cool.

TEM: What else, before we move chronologically into college, what are some of the other things that you remember you did when you were growing up the first 18 years besides chemistry. What were some of your-

DG: I played competitive softball all the way up until the last bit of high school. Let's see, I was like a weird kid.

TEM: Normal stuff.

DG: I don't know. I never considered myself really cool or anything. I took 00:13:00Spanish at an early age. As soon as I could. I think it's super cool that Eugene schools have the immersion stuff. I wish I had had something like that because I didn't get to start studying another language until like 7th grade. But that was cool. Softball was a really big part of my life. Played on like 3 different teams at one point. Won a ton of big tournaments. School was what ruled my life, especially my three years in high school where I was in that intensive program. It's not just school you also have to fulfill 150 hours of community service and they have to be categorized in 3 different categories and you have an extended essay which is an essay about knowledge and what you learn and how you learn and 00:14:00then also you had all these internal assessments where you have to write these big papers for history, for English, for chemistry. It ruled my life, really, being studious.

TEM: What were your community service projects?

DG: I did like lots of coaching or umpire for little girls' softball games or t-ball, stacking food at a local food bank. You get real creative towards the end and you still have like 20 hours left that you're trying to get off but over 2 years 150 hours is a lot of hours, so I counted anything I could. We like Christmas-caroled at old folks' homes. You have to do ones that are artistic.

You have to do ones that are active. You have to do ones that are creative. Lots 00:15:00of community service in however way I could swing it.

TEM: Which seems like it played out later in your life.

DG: Yeah, actually. Because I basically decided going into college chemistry is where I wanted to be and my next step was teacher. I wanted to teach high school chemistry was like what I started with when I went into college. My reasoning there was I love chemistry, everyone who doesn't love chemistry the first thing that they say is oh I hated that class in high school. I guarantee anyone watching this like 50% are like oh I hated high school chemistry. No you didn't. you hated your high school chemistry teacher. You just had a teacher that didn't care. I think that's easily said about any subject. Chemistry in particular if you don't have someone who's passionate about it there's absolutely no way you 00:16:00can be either. I've had lots of chemistry teachers in different chemistry subjects and the best ones are the ones that love what they do. I think that's true of any subject, but I decided education is where I wanted to go. I started, I TAed, for general chemistry in the labs, so I was able to teach a bunch of undergrads, which is like insanely stressful. They're only 2 years younger than me, maybe. Some of them are older than me. they're playing with dangerous acids and I can't even get them to put their goggles on. It was stressful but it was fun. It was also interesting to see what my peers thought of me as a teacher, because you get the course evaluations at the end. It was like strict but fun 00:17:00was basically what mine said. I was like no I'm not strict. I just want you to be safe.

TEM: Put your goggles on!

DG: Flip flops are not cool.

TEM: How did you decide where to go to school? What was your-what drew you here?

DG: My high school class Inglemoor High School, go Vikings. Actually we have our 10-year reunion this year. It's crazy weird. Very odd. Everyone's posting their baby pictures right now. I can't handle it. I'm in the beer industry pregnancy's not like-

TEM: You can take pictures of the lab.

DG: Yeah, like my cats [laughs]. Our high school was so big in the area that we were at that UW, University of Washington, 1% of the incoming freshman class was 00:18:00from my high school. I had this realization that I didn't really want to be the same person I was in high school. I didn't want to walk into a class of 100 people that I know that I know at least one other person in there. I wanted change, something new. So I looked at WSU and a few other places in Washington, Bellingham a bit western. But I was actually really interested in Oregon. I couldn't really tell you why. I think it was because it was close to my family but far enough. I'm the oldest of two brothers. I've always had a lot of responsibility regarding taking care of them, being the role model. I was like 00:19:00I'm done with that. I don't want any part of it anymore. I was pretty much dead set on going out of state and I applied to in state colleges pretty much for my parents, sorry mom and dad. Mom and I took a trip to come and view the two campuses down here. We stopped first at Corvallis. It was pouring rain it was just absolutely pouring. We're from Seattle so rain's not that big of a deal. But it smelled bad, because of whatever was happening that day on campus whether agriculture was doing some methane study I'm not sure.

TEM: You do get some special winds.

DG: Yeah, you do. Now going back to Corvallis it's a great campus. I love hanging out there with my friends who live and work there. But it was just first impressions are so strong and we couldn't find parking because it's Corvallis.

It was just a disaster of a tour. I wasn't all that impressed with the 00:20:00facilities and I'm sure it just had to do with the long drive and then the rain and just all these factors so that when we got to the U of O, the sun was out and there were roses everywhere and classes were in session and a cute skateboarder guy winked at me. there was just like, this is where I'm going to school, Mom. I love, it's beautiful. This campus is beautiful. The classes are not bad. I just, I don't know.

TEM: You felt the click.

DG: I did. And incidentally I was watching the Mighty Ducks when I got my acceptance letter [laughs]. Full circle.

TEM: Yep. What was it like as an incoming freshman to start at the U of O? What 00:21:00are some of your early experiences that you remember of what it was like to dive into higher level chemistry?

DG: First of all I had felt because of IB, because of that program, I was overly prepared. I came in with 15 credits. I already skipped a couple of classes that my dorm mates were in. so I was cocky, super cocky. I did not give a fuck. I don't know if I can say that. I did not care. I worked so hard all through junior high and high school that I was like college, no program I got this. and then your grades come back and you're like oh... gotta study. Gotta actually put 00:22:00in that effort and maybe no party so hard. Because college is also-I had been on the softball team, I was in the science Olympiad, I was in IB, I had no room for intoxicants of any type in high school. I never touched them, never was interested in them. then you come to college; you're away from home' you're around all these new people, and I discovered beer. Sort of a pivotal moment, you know? I had always watched my dad get ridiculed by his extended family for drinking Fat Tire. Oh he drinks craft beer. New Belgium Fat Tire. I already had a little bit of I have a higher standard, so all my friends are drinking Natty Ice and I got my little Drop Top from Widmer. College is just a fun part, I 00:23:00don't know. education happens too. I always had this firm belief that if you can't hold your alcohol, you're going to have a hard time in business. I know that sounds really silly, but especially being in this industry now. I had no way of knowing I'd be in beer, but being in this industry now if you can't have a pint or two or maybe three and not still remain, have composure, you're not going to be as respected. I know that's crazy, right? There's like this culture around drinking and business. You like watch Mad Men and they're pouring three finger whiskey shots during a business meeting. Things have changed since then but there's still a little bit of expectation that if you go to a business 00:24:00dinner or a meeting or something and if there's beer on tap, if there's cocktails, if they're buying you a drink it's rude to say no and you need to be able to control yourself. I'd like to think that I practiced that in college.

TEM: Yeah, and I think it's the, maybe the, continuing to be responsible and that you still have to be able to have conversations.

DG: Yeah, totally. I had no idea how poignant that would be in my later career. So I took that to heart and still managed to get good grades and study. I had classes I loved, classes I hated. When I could I'd try to dabble outside of the sciences and what was on my list of classes to take.

I took some education stuff, some environmental studies stuff. I worked really 00:25:00hard with Julie Hack, who is I think she's still the Assistant Department Head of chemistry over at U of O and we worked really hard on green chemistry education, so talking to teachers and chemists about making their experiments cleaner, safer, less hazardous to humans, less hazardous to fish and wildlife. There's lots of principles built into environmental chemistry or green chemistry and we worked on outreach and education, teaching people about what it is and how to teach it and so there it is again: me teaching, doing lots of interpersonal conversations, trying to improve, trying to make it so that what we're doing isn't contributing overall to the negative health of the planet. Not 00:26:00that chemistry is a huge supplier of any of the greenhouse gases or whatever. The overall chemical industry is only 1% of pollution, but can't we get that down to .5%? we probably could. We have the tools to do that. It's part of our job.

TEM: Where were some other places that desire for teaching, did you continue, or were you able to take education classes this is how you teach people things?

DG: Yeah, I took a few education classes. It's interesting because I felt like all of the advice, or all of the stuff that you're learning that you can actually apply to a classroom it honestly felt like it was geared towards 00:27:00humanities and not the sciences and maths and it was pretty apparent, most of the people in those classes were there to teach English, to teach history, to teach elementary school. It gave me a really good insight to that side of education but it wasn't exactly easy to apply that to the lab classes I was teaching. I also did a lot of tutoring, a lot of homework help and grading. Lots of grading. I had a few opportunities to teach classes when the professor was sick or whatever. They were like here you go and here are the materials you can tweak it a little bit if you want. I even got to teach one of my own lectures about green chemistry to a bunch of undergrads. It was, I just any place I 00:28:00could, I taught-there was the green chemistry and education workshop that the university puts on yearly or biannually, like once or twice a year, and I took the opportunity to volunteer and so I was teaching college professors from all over the nation about green chemistry and let me tell you teachers are the hardest people to teach, totally. They're, this is how we've been doing it for years. Well, yeah, put your goggles on [laughs].

TEM: Were there things that you took from the humanities people that you applied to teaching in the sciences. Did you feel like there were bits that you hadn't gotten in other classes?

DG: Be yourself. There's this really interesting, if you walk into a science class versus like a history class, there's just in general a different feel. The teacher has this, in a science class has sort of maybe a little more dull sort of feel. This is very logical let me write it down, blah, blah, blah. Whereas in history and English there's more of a discussion between the person who's up front and the people in the seats. There are obviously examples of those being swapped, but I think for the most part the thing that I took away the most was to engage.

You know have a conversation, be a person and a teacher, whereas you don't get 00:30:00resources or necessarily time to do that as a science teacher. Does that make sense?

TEM: Yeah. Well, I'm curious-we hear a lot about and emphasis on connecting the STEM areas to younger girls, young women. Did you experience that? Was that something that was emerging when you were early on?

DG: Yeah, so, first of all Mrs. O'Connor my eighth grade science teacher, first female science teacher I'd ever had or knew or met, you know? From there I had one other female science teacher, she taught physics in high school. That in itself was very obvious and then being one of two girls in the science club in high school. I think I was just one of the lucky ones that all my teachers 00:31:00nurtured my love of science. I was never once told oh no you can't do this. I feel like I was really lucky because some of my girlfriends who are in the sciences now have stories about how they were ridiculed for being interested in science. I think I got off pretty easy in that regard. But I also recognize that I was one of the lucky ones. Not all girls who go through the science and math programs have as much support or are given any sort of extra help if they need it. One of the ways that I combated that actually, it's interesting you bring it up, I worked mostly during the summer. There would be programs were the science teachers at the U of O would put on science camps for girls. There's one called 00:32:00the spice camp, which was, hold on: Science, Creativity in Engineering... oh crap, I can't ever remember what it was. But it was basically nurturing and having a science camp specifically designed for girls. We did things with lasers. We did things with... there's different ways that you can create a solar cell with blackberry juice. What else did we do? We did this one thing, like a girl scout badge we created for this one guy who his daughter was in girl scouts and wanted a cool science badge. He's like we don't really have anything like 00:33:00that what can we make? So we did a forensic badge and we created this crime scene and we had all these little girls like 8-10 dusting for prints and you know I had to do a bunch of research into forensics. That was a new thing for me. So, I had to learn it, teach it, implement it. The creepiest thing-I'm sure we could find the picture but I don't know if the U of O would want anyone to have it, but we dressed these girls up in the little hazmat bunny suits, you know the ones that it's just your face sticking out and they got the goggles and we did blood splatter testing. We took one of the smaller science rooms, covered the entire thing in plastic, and had these mannikin head dolls that we put blood in, fake blood. Gave them a bunch of blunt weapons, but it was so creepy but it 00:34:00was so much fun. It was so crazy to see these little girls in these bunny suits whacking Manikin heads with hammers and baseball bats and then pulling out their ruler and pen and measuring-it was really cool, really unique, really bizarre.

TEM: Do you feel like there are different strategies for teaching young girls or do you think it's giving them the opportunity just to do it.

DG: I think it's just offering the opportunity. In no way were any of the times I did science classes or science camps did teaching boys change in any way versus teaching girls. Even as a lab teacher for undergrads, it didn't matter if you were male or female, I'm still going to try and change how I teach you.

You like to learn by me writing things out. You learn best just by talking verbally, I'll do that. It's about the individual. The gender doesn't matter, I think. That's my experience. I think that being approachable and personable as a teacher is something that gets the best results or impacts students the most.

TEM: Were there times at the U of O where, I'm sensing a certain social responsibility to the larger whole that it's not just about you learning but consideration for learning consideration for the environment.

DG: Maybe it is a little bit selfish because I've always found that I learn best when I'm teaching it to someone. It holds me accountable to actually know what I'm talking about. I can't just wing it. I think that really came through with 00:36:00the forensics camp. I was like oh my God. So I talked to a forensics investigation from the Eugene Police Department. We watched an episode of CSI and she discussed like oh this is what they did right. This is what they did wrong. This is a good episode; this is a bad episode. It was really interesting. not that the little girls could care or even notice whether or not I would know what I was talking about or not, but for myself I think I learn best when I'm helping someone else understand it and larger social responsibility, yeah. It's never been the motivation so much as the drive, just helping giving back the outreach has been synonymous with teaching for me. That's the best way I can 00:37:00give something to someone. I can teach you. what do you want to know? Are you curious about this? Let's talk about that. Maybe we'll get into an area that I don't know much about and our conversation will help me learn more in that area too.

TEM: Was it that curiosity that lead you to beer? That you wanted to know more? How did you take the corner that changed to-?

DG: Yeah, so as graduation was approaching and I didn't have any job opportunities or prospects, the teachers that I liked the best from my chemistry experience were the ones that had been in industry. The teachers that went from high school to college to grad school to academia, very knowledgeable 00:38:00individuals but I felt like they didn't have that I don't know, there was something missing in their stories, in the way that they taught. It felt like to me the people who oh I worked at this chemical company for this long and let me tell you about this one time-those stories are what made that teacher interesting. I was like do I go to grad school or do I go into industry, what happens after college? I finally settled on industry. I got a job in a local water testing facility. It was so boring. It was so boring. Water is not very exciting, let me tell you. In theory we did some cool stuff, like google has a 00:39:00server farm in Oregon and you got to make sure that that water is not picking up any heavy metals because then it could corrode or destroy a server which could destroy data which can then be traceable, or not traceable, what am I saying here? Could just corrupt the data so you can't get it back. We did some cool stuff but it was incredibly repetitive. I was just another pair of goggles on the bench. It wasn't, it was a good springboard, but it wasn't-I was like this is not, I'm out of here as soon as I can find another job because this is not for me. that's when I started questioning maybe I should have gone into education right away.

If this is how it's going to be at all testing facilities like no thanks. It was 00:40:00around that time that I was just looking for something else and I didn't know what.

TEM: This is like 2010?

DG: Yeah, yep. End of 2010, early 2011 I was just unhappy at the water place. I really was and it was on Craigslist, actually, in science jobs. If you're a scientist you know on Craigslist that's like 3 listings and 2 of them are four months old. You don't get them very often but there's this one: chemist for hire at a local brewery. I thought, oh, I love beer. I love chemistry. I could do both of those things. who is this? there's only... this is 2010. There's only 00:41:00like 3 breweries in Eugene right now. So I checked all their websites, found out it was Ninkasi that was hiring. I replied to the craigslist ad, replied to their online ad, went in person dropped off a resume, and then every other day for two weeks I was like I'm going to have this job are you ready to interview me yet? I was insanely pushy. More pushy than I've ever been for any job and like every Ninkasi employee I didn't think I got the job after the interviews. They had me come back and we're walking through the brewery and they were like you'll get used to this, this tap doesn't have hot water and the little quirks. I was like does that mean I got the job and the guy was like no one told you? No, do I work here now? [laughs] Then the person that was hired after me was HR, human 00:42:00resources, the hiring process changed after I got put on.

TEM: That's pretty funny.

DG: Yeah. I don't know if it had anything to do with-

TEM: You pre-date HR.

DG: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I fondly refer to those times as the golden age of Ninkasi. I think a lot of the employees that are still there and even the ones that aren't refer to it as that as well, because it was weird. We all wore a lot of different hats that we maybe weren't qualified for and it was just a unique time.

TEM: What are some of your first impressions of the company? What are those early what makes it golden?

DG: I remember walking in and being like this is not as sterile as it should be. That's just the scientist in me speaking before I really knew that much about the beer process. Up until that point my relationship with beer was you drink 00:43:00the good stuff when you got money and you drink the crappy stuff when you don't. that's how, I knew the difference between a lager and an ale. I knew the overall brewing process. I did sort of home brew with my dad in our bathtub when I was in high school and my mom was all pissed-she's not even 21! You know. that was my experience with beer up until that point. My first impressions were basically like this is going to be awesome, how can it not? There was the Ninkasi building, the main building, which was technically their second building because the first one was actually in Springfield. Ninkasi was initially in Springfield and then I think it was maybe 6 months to 8 months in they moved to the 00:44:00Whiteaker and they revamped that 272 Van Buren place. I think I got there in year four, year three. Early. And it was, I mean I don't even recognize it now. It's so different, especially with the new buildings. 272 was the whole thing. They had a little place just cattycorner from it that had the art department and local distribution, local D. they were like oh we're going to build a lab in this little warehouse for you. do you want to see the lab? Like yeah. So we walk in and there's a hood in the corner and a desk. I was like this is great. Like I need a sink. I need countertops. So they put in a sink and countertops.

They built in a little laboratory and because I was in the same warehouse as the art department, we became known as arts and sciences. That was our little area. Tony Figoli, who has since left Ninkasi and started his company doing artwork for local breweries. We've both like at this point left and carried on what we're doing but outside of Ninkasi. That's a cool coincidence. Those were the golden years. We had whiskey Fridays. Our sensory panels were rudimentary at best. Any brewery will tell you the hardest part about sensory is getting people in the door to taste the beer. When you work in such a fast-paced industry where the ingredients you're working with are going to be gone out the door on shelves 00:46:00in two weeks, you don't have a lot of extra time on your hands. So getting people into sensory is hard, and so learning about ways to get people to show up for sensory and keep showing up and not lose that interest was interesting, especially difficult because we were in a warehouse, very cold in the winters. Couldn't really keep it warm. Those are some of the best memories. Just the old-school Ninkasi people huddled, super cold in this warehouse, talking about beer-what it tastes like. We bought some chemicals to do spiking, to do off-flavors and some thresholds. Learning myself about my blind spots or my strong points. DMS, if there's any DMS in that beer I will be able to tell you. 00:47:00Meanwhile, Diacetyl, which is that buttery flavor, completely blind. Everyone else can be like oh I can't drink it. I'm like oh, why? Oh, it's yeah that's bad, right? That's real bad.

TEM: So are you running sensory testing too? Was that, like that was all part of-?

DG: Yeah. When I first started we were doing, we were testing the bottle air, so checking for oxygen and making sure CO2 levels are good in the bottles. Then what else? PH and there was, I feel like there was something else we were testing for initially. Then slowly just accumulating equipment. So we got stuff to do alcohol distillation so we could test the alcohol in the final product. We had the hood, so we started doing micro testing for bacteria, making sure there are no beer spoilers in the tanks. Keeping an eye on wild yeast, making sure 00:48:00that's not getting its way in and imparting interesting and different flavors, then just growing from there. Adding sensory, which is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to have quality control in a brewery. And it's the most fun, honestly. If you can get people to show up. It's very easy to come up with an excuse to not drink beer at 10 AM, it really is. Especially if you know some of that beer is going to be spiked with a gross flavor. For the first year it was okay but as our quantities and our barrel production increased, so did the amount of beer I had to test so sensory was getting really overwhelming. There was no way to do sensory and my job all at the same time, so we started looking 00:49:00for someone to hire to help out and initially it was like oh it's going to be part-time lab, part-time sensory but once we had Jared Clark, the sensory guy we hired he was from Firestone. I was like we can't waste his brilliance. We need him all in sensory. We then created the science department. I was the lab, the analytical side, and he was sensory the human side. A great team. We were a really good team. Data sharing is really important. Having those open lines of communication. Being able to discuss: okay your panel said this about that beer. My data confirms that, like, alright we need to go and discuss what's going to happen with this beer because it's not Total Dom, or its not or whatever beer it was targeting, something's not right.

How can we creatively handle the solution. We can slap a different label on it. Call it something else. Call it a one-off. We can throw it in barrels, age it, see what happens. There are so many unique and interesting ideas and ways to handle a beer that didn't hit its targets. Those were some really great times with Jared, having someone else in the lab with me was really vital. I didn't realize how lonely I had gotten, especially because up until that point I had been around people. One of the things we had started doing was more outreach, so I went to Ashland Science Works, their little OMSI version down there and did a fermentation program, a little talk, and kids got to come up and look in a 00:51:00microscope and see yeast. I still tried to do that. I stayed in close contact with the U of O. So, I came in a couple times and talked to their chemistry club a few times about how to get a job in an industry that you're interested in or what it's like to do beer chemistry. All sort of varied. Just trying to stay on top of that outreach. Jared did a ton of outreach as well, lots of sensory. We'd have distributors come in and he'd talk them through how to professionally taste a beer. It's not just sip and think about it and spit it back out. You never spit beer out. That's a wine thing. It was important to us that people understand that what we're doing improves the quality and consistency of beer 00:52:00but only if the consumer is educated. We tried really hard to do a lot of education. I'm trying to think what else we did... I mean there was just so many classes, tasting classes, off-flavor classes, and we tried to make sure the employees were educated so they could talk about beer regardless of were they in marketing, were they a brewer. We want them to be able to use the same language, the same vocabulary to describe our beer.

TEM: There's the consistency and the sensory piece, but what are some of the considerations for the legal side of the fact that you're producing an alcohol product? Was there something that the lab did, and if you're testing for alcohol.

DG: Just as some perspective-tobacco has to be tested for I think 44 different compounds and have to be accurate to a certain degree for all those compounds. In state where marijuana's legal, it's like 50+ compounds that have to be tested for and within range for all those before you can sell it. Beer has one. And that's alcohol. You have to be, you know, so you read a label and it says 7.4. you have to be within .3% That means that beer in that with that label, 7.4% can have alcohol as high as 7.7% or as low as 7.1% and still be legal. Not only is 00:54:00there only thing that's legally required, you don't have to be that accurate. That is pretty much all that matters in the very end: is the alcohol on target? If it tastes different, that's a different problem. Do you re-label it as a different beer? Do you just put it out there and hope it's okay? Do you only give it to employees? There's lots of little considerations and every beer's different, so every beer's going to have a different problem or not problem, which means a different solution or not-solution: dump it. The dump beers are very rare. Because it's very expensive to dump beer. What I like to remind breweries is yes it is expensive to dump a beer but even more expensive is losing a customer.

This is my personal experience: when, and I really try not to do this, but when I drink a beer that's not good, and I always try to avoid the term as bad beer. Because there's no such thing. I don't like IPAs, but I can acknowledge, I can recognize good IPAs. Saying bad is not constructive in any way. That being said when I drink a beer that is not technically good: it has flaws, it didn't ferment all the way, it's super acidic or what's that, it's like chewing on something... I not only stop drinking that beer but I'm probably less likely to drink that brewery. Not only that, I'm going to tell my friends don't waste your 00:56:00money on this beer, which to them says don't waste your money on this brewery. I'm trying really hard not to do that anymore, make bad recommendations. I think that that's something the whole industry needs to work on, is not throwing a brewery under the bus when one of their beers isn't technically good. But, I think it can also be a really good awakening for a brewery when you hear someone be like look that beer I drank is terrible and I tell people not to drink it. I think if you can avoid that, which you can with sensory, with quality control, you should.

TEM: How common is it for breweries to have on-site chemists?

DG: In Oregon, there's only 15% of breweries have a laboratory or some sort of 00:57:00quality-control program. Actual chemists? Probably even lower. What's really common for a quality control is to have a yeast counting for moving tank to tank if you're doing a yeast transfer instead of pitching brand new yeast. Most of the time you can train a brewer or seller to do that. You don't necessarily need a chemical background for it. Yet you can still call that a quality control program because you are keeping track of the yeast, making sure it hits a certain standard before you move forward with it. Not very many.

TEM: Do you feel like as there are more and more breweries that there is a higher acceptance/expectation of having professionals on staff to do that work or do people just send it out?

DG: That's a tough question because it really depends on the size of the brewery. Breweries with labs are ones that everyone's going to recognize: Ninkasi, Deschutes, Sierra Nevada, Red Hook, New Belgium, Oscar Blues. These are huge breweries with large budgets but when you go down to little breweries, let's say Man Cave in Eugene. Have you heard of them?

TEM: Mm-hmm [yes].

DG: Yeah, okay, well, dang I thought I was hoping I would have a little one in there. How about ColdFire?

TEM: No, I've not heard of ColdFire.

DG: That's cheating though, they've only been open a month, but they don't have those resources. They don't have that money. They in the past a brewery that small wouldn't have any sort of lab program, wouldn't ship out samples. Because that one sample, not only do you have to ship a 22 ounce bottle of it to 00:59:00California, which is not cheap, you have to pay $150 to get the ABV, and that turnaround time, 5-7 days, and you don't get the results until it gets to you in the snail mail. That's absurd. By that time the beer's already been out on the shelf for a week. That's not viable, which is why I created BrewLab. You need fast turnaround time. as soon as your sample gets here it gets tested plus or minus a day. It's really expensive to have a chemist. On the one hand, there's a little bit of guilt. My company basically makes it so that there are breweries now that will not hire chemists.

I'm much cheaper than a salaried person. There's a little bit of guilt there where I'm like not helping my fellow chemists or fellow beer lovers. I think overall having a lab, whether it's on site or here, it's going to improve your beer. My absolute biggest barrier there is a brewer's ego. I'm sure I could catch flack for this, but it is #1 problem I run into, when I'm like you need a lab, whether it's me, whether it's the expensive guys down in California, or the super-expensive guy in Kentucky, you need to have something telling you you're hitting your points. They're like oh my beer is mine so it's a gift from God, like, no man everyone makes mistakes and sometimes they're not your mistakes, 01:01:00they're the mistakes of the equipment: a faulty hose, of a valve that didn't open all the way and you're never going to know if you don't test constantly. You don't even need to test every batch, just once a day, once a week. Create that baseline so that when something goes faulty you can look back and say oh didn't put the hops in or whatever. There are a lot of breweries out there that don't have a lab simply because they don't believe they need one, which is absurd [laughs].

TEM: But they do their own, so then they would be doing their own ABV testing in house?

DG: Yeah, which is generally a hydrometer, and if it's one brewer doing the hydrometer readings, it's pretty accurate. I find the ABV most of the time I ask 01:02:00that people don't give me what they expect the data to be. Sometimes they just do. But I like to go into it blind. It's better science that way. But the people who give me that data or afterwards say this is what I expected. For the most part, breweries are within a percent. It needs to be within .3%, legally, that's pretty decent. Home brewers, I find are about 2%, plus or minus 2%, for their calculations. Honestly I think it's because everybody reads hydrometer differently. They tell you this is the meniscus, you read at the bottom of the meniscus. But you know those graveyard shifts you're really tired, you want to go home you're waiting for the wart to cool and your spinner your hydrometer 01:03:00waiting you're like, oh, good enough, 10 20. Whatever. Everyone reads it differently, so you're going to get variation just by that human error. The breweries with handheld densitometers or who actually do alcohol testing in some way that's not a hydrometer are generally a little more accurate.

TEM: Well, the advance in technology in the you know 30+ years since Bridgeport and Widmer opened. That's a huge, the tools available.

DG: You'd think.

TEM: [Laughs].

DG: That's another interesting commentary is that the main standards in beer testing is provided by the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) who are a 01:04:00bunch of really old white guys who have only ever dealt with macro-beer. All of these methods, all of the stuff, all of the processes that I follow are designed for big beer but all my clients are this big [shows a few inches between hands]. They do a thousand barrels a year, barely anything. We need to recreate standards so that they're widely available to anyone. In the end that will probably put me out of business, but it's important that beer has the ability to adapt to a science and it hasn't really. It's starting to, especially now with how big it's getting and there's a ton of commentary right now like oh we hit 4,200 breweries in the United States, that's more than pre-prohibition.

How are you going to stand out? Quality, consistency, that's how you stand out. 01:05:00Also, you don't need to. You just have to have a good, strong community that supports your brewery and you need to provide them with a consistent beer. Every town has a brewery where the beer isn't that consistent.

TEM: Do you think those guidelines allow for the creativity that's possible for smaller breweries, that they're not brewing huge amounts of beer so they can be more creative. Do you think that that's part of the way the standards could adapt or is that not-is that an apples and oranges comparison?

DG: I think what you're asking about is more of style guidelines. Making sure an IPA is 5-7%, 50-80 IBUs. Those are the style guidelines and yeah I think that 01:06:00the style guidelines-and the BJCP, the Brew Judging Certification Program, they just came out with brand new style guidelines for 2015. It hadn't been updated since 2008. That's really cool. There's a bunch of new styles in there. A lot of the sour styles have been broken up into better categories I think. Yes, I think that because there's so many breweries and so many of them are so small that really new and experimental ideas are kind of what's bringing you to the forefront but you need to be able to do that consistently. You need to be able to consistently come up with something creative. If you just constantly are low in alcohol, that's easy to fix. Really easy to fix. But if you don't know and 01:07:00you just keep putting out these beers and they're not winning in their styles, well, what do you expect? Your alcohol is low.

TEM: Speaking of creativity and style, let's talk about the Ninkasi in space.

DG: Can you see it on the [within the video frame]?

TEM: I don't know let's, hold I'll move it just a little [video pans up to poster on the wall].

DG: A quick pan. I don't know if you can also see this. this is actually what the payload design looked like. This is-

TEM: I probably shouldn't. I was going to zoom in, but I should probably just-

DG: That's okay. Yeah and ground control. Let's see, I think it was, does it have a year on there? It doesn't. everything starts to blend together. I think it was in 2013 that Nikos and Jamie, the owners of Ninkasi, came to me all 01:08:00secret and giddy. I'm like what is going on here? They come to the lab and they're like alright Dana, we're putting you on a top secret project. I was like okay can I talk to my-? No, don't talk to your boss about this, this is just you and us three. No one else knows. I was like oh my God what is it? They're like we're shooting yeast into space and you're going to do it. I'm like what?

TEM: Did you immediately laugh?

DG: Oh yeah. I was like what are you smoking? Did you guys go to sensory before this? it was silly. I was like okay. They gave me some people that I had to contact. I was working with team Hybriddyne and CSXT. Is that right? [looks over at poster]. I always say it wrong. CSXT, yeah. Which is the Civilian Space Exploration Team. They're like one step down from Space X I would say in infamy. 01:09:00They give me names and numbers of some people to contact and we designed a payload. We were working with a 3D printer up in Portland that created the actual payload and then I had to find a way to keep the yeast from dying because this was the first, the first time the yeast in slants were sent into space. Up to this point, yeast has been in space. That's not new. But it's been the dried, bread yeast or mold yeast to see like oh can we grow this in space, whatever.

Having live cultures of yeast shot into space and then back down was never done before. You know we couldn't-generally yeast libraries are held in glass tubes. I think I have an example just your average test tube [puts test tube on table], is generally what yeast slants are held in. I needed to come up with a way to seal it, make it so it's not breakable but still viable, so still able to brew beer. Talking with team Hybriddyne, figuring out how many strains we wanted to send into space. At the time the Ninkasi yeast library had I think 23, 24 strains of yeast that had been collected over time. there was like, you like buy 01:11:00yeast and prop it up and it goes through a few generations and then you collect it and save it and then you never have to buy it again. Other breweries are like oh you need this yeast for this specialty beer you're making? Have some of ours. Add that to the library. This is Cascade Lakes, check whatever. The whole library was about 23 strains and I think what we ended up on was, uh... I'm counting-that's right six, six strains. So we designed this little guy to have a bunch of holes in it and a space above and a space below that we could fill with dry ice, so it would keep the yeast cold. A rocket launch is a lot of heat. A lot of heat. We weren't really sure how long from launch to finding the payload, 01:12:00we didn't know how long that would take. I thought at the time 12 hours was a really good window. The dry ice would stay active for about 6 hours and the payload itself will stay cold for maybe another 6, maybe another 10. It was all really, I mean no one's done this. we got it 3D printed. I painted it black and blue, the Ninkasi colors. It was just this little guy. It held the dry ice, the carbon dioxide, solid at the bottom. I have a really nice CO2 burn on my leg from the experience. What we ended up doing with the yeast was we had something 01:13:00similar to these guys, a little bit bigger, which are plastic centrifuge tubes. What's like, I have water in this one which is a counter balance for my centrifuge, but they can withstand a pretty decent amount of force, because they are in a centrifuge generally. They don't pop open, the lids don't pop open. We filled it, we did the media for the slant, then we put the yeast on there, let them grow, then we filled the rest and tried to make it no air in there whatsoever, mineral oil. It was completely sealed. Then so much parafilm wrapped around it. Anything I could to keep it in place. We did a bunch of experimenting, testing, making sure how long can we keep this container cold. How cold does it get? How long will it stay that cold? So spent a lot of time in 01:14:00Portland with Team Hybriddyne testing. Get a huge-ass block of CO2 and just chip away at it, add it to it and lots of testing that way. Finally, in December of 2013 at the all-company meeting, where they bring everyone from Washington and California at the time was the territory, brought everyone in for a big company-wide meeting and they finally made the announcement that we're shooting yeast into space this summer, this coming summer. I have goosebumps right now. It was so nice to finally talk to people about it. That whole year, whenever I could, I'd be like oh yeah I have a big project launching in 2014. I'd try to like drop the little stupid hints.

No one ever caught on. a brewery shooting a rocket into space filled with brewer's yeast? Okay.

TEM: That wouldn't be something that people would come up with.

DG: Yeah that's not something. Got a big project launching in 2014, oh my next projects going to be out of this world. Little puns where I could. Up to that point, I could only talk to Jaime or Nikos about it and the team, the like rocket team, which, by the way, civilian rocketry is an absurd hobby. It is so cool but these guys have been building rockets and shooting rockets together for like 30 years. So there is so much history there and the day of the launch was just very, the night before and the day of was just such an emotional roller coaster, lots of old grudges started coming up. There was lots of fighting in 01:16:00between the different groups. There was a lot of drama that we didn't really show because it wasn't about that, right? but it was a very emotionally-tolling trip. Nikos and I drove out to the black rock desert a day or two before the launch and we're just giant balls of nerves. So nervous like is this going to work? we don't know? we bought this cooler that plugs into your car and keeps things cold. So we had the yeast in there. Also I got a little travel microscope and I had like a go bag of being able to test the yeast viability on the playa as soon as we got the yeast back. I wanted to be able to test that right then. 01:17:00we had everything and had the payload, had a whole bunch of challenger coins made. I wonder where mine is. I'll have to see if I can find it. It's customary that when you launch a rocket, you have challenger coins made. The really, really old ones, the ones that made it to the moon or up into the atmosphere and back, or stratosphere back, can be really, really popular and famous. We had a whole bunch made. Everyone on the team got one and I think Ninkasi might give out a few here and there as like special tokens, I don't know. let's see what else? We had a project this Canadian kid's academy. It was a special Montessori 01:18:00sort of school sent us lettuce seeds, that we put lettuce seeds in there so they could grow lettuce that was in space. I'm trying to think-I feel like-oh we had, who's the famous beer guy in Portland, Don-

TEM: Younger.

DG: Younger-had his ashes in there. We had a specialty little thing built. Very weird. I was the one who put the thing together in the end. Had all the slants in there. Had all the coins and the seeds. So I was the one that put the ashes, and I had never met Don Younger. I of course know of him and his great contributions to craft beer. That was like, here I am putting this guy's remains in this hockey puck essentially. I was the only one there doing it. I was like I feel like this isn't right. We need someone who knows him to say something. So 01:19:00we had his ashes in there. Yeah, I mean I did not sleep the night before. No way. You know? I was so nervous. Like is it going to work? What if it doesn't work? All this for nothing. Let's see, I mean everything was ready. We had a few, there was like a sponsor there that had a jet pack and so they jet packed around the site launch. It was so cool. I've never seen anything like it. But it still didn't really calm anything. I was still super nervous. We had, we went through mission practice where they go through all the call signals and I got to be there for the whole thing. I had a designation as scientist.

Like, scientist was on the launchpad was my cue to go and put the payload into the rocket. We practiced that the day before. We're out there and we decided that we wanted to add the CO2 at the very last minute possible. We wanted to be able to have the yeast be cold for the absolute longest amount of time that we possibly could. Sitting on the playa floor I'm like shaking. We've got CO2 that someone's like banging up with a hammer. We've got gloves that we're handling the CO2 with and shoving it into the little crevices of the payload and fill the bottom and fill the top, put everything on and my leg started hurting really bad. I look down, I had this huge chunk of dry ice just on it. You can't wipe it 01:21:00off you have to pull it. If you slide it across your body at all it'll bring skin with it, anyway. I have a really big scar from this whole thing, which I think is fitting. It's my own little space yeast tattoo. We got it, it was just such a blur. We got it into the rocket and then we got into the little car. The rocket was about a mile away from the site of our set up. From that point on, we were about 5 minutes out. Just so emotional. I could easily get emotional about it right now. It went off without a hitch. It was from what we could tell it was perfect. The trajectory was right on. the timing was perfect. Because we were 01:22:00worried about train schedules. There was a train that runs right next to the playa. You can't really shoot rockets. There's all the airbases nearby that you have to notify and get permission. There's so many steps before you actually hit the launch button. Yeah, so it goes up and we all lost it. The sun was just rising. The desert was still fairly cool. We were completely decked out in Ninkasi stuff. We were all wearing t-shirts and hats and coats. We're in the middle of the desert in July but it was fitting. I have a friend that made little Ninkasi bottle cap earrings. We're just crying and hugging because it 01:23:00worked, you know? then we had to just go find it. That's where things stopped being so great. I was so tired. This project had been going on for a year. Finally came to fruition, exploded, got up. As far as we knew based on timing and calculations that it was already back at this point. Impact should have happened. So we just had to go find it. We could not, we had this huge fleet of cars just all over the desert looking with binoculars, with different radio receivers. There were a couple of different pinging mechanisms on the rocket itself that we could use to find the location. There's a GPS on it. What we know 01:24:00now is that the GPS that was used was state of the art but it wasn't tested for sonic speeds, so as soon as the rocket hits sonic speeds, which is 2 seconds, 3 seconds after launch it knocked out the GPS. So we couldn't find it. We paid for a helicopter to come in and look for it. At that point, when the helicopter came in we'd been searching for the better part of 4, 5 hours. Meanwhile I'm counting down, you know? trying not to get emotional, just counting down knowing there's only 6 hours left for the yeast.

I was like, I'm so tired. Someone set up a little cot for me in the back of someone's car. I passed out for a few hours. There's always that hope that when you wake up it's like did we find it? We didn't. we searched until that night. Still nothing.

TEM: Did you ever find it?

DG: Yes, they did. 30 days later.

TEM: How close were you when you were driving around?

DG: Not.

TEM: Oh.

DG: Which, I don't know if that's better or worse.

TEM: Yeah.

DG: It was shot at a degree off of where it should have been, I think. And that 1 degree change made all the difference in where we were looking versus where we should have been looking and that night we went back to the main house where 01:26:00everyone was staying, at least the majority of people were staying. We had a eulogy for the yeast. It was really an emotional roller coaster. We had put so much time and effort and money and this experiment was, it all relied on this one thing that we just assumed, which was that we'd find the rocket. We did. Eventually but the yeast wasn't viable and I tried. As soon as we got it back we had them put it on ice immediately. It was shipped to us refrigerated. We had 6 01:27:00strains. I grabbed yeast from all 6 hoping that one, just one, would have viable yeast. It'd been out on black rock desert in July for 30 days. There was nothing left. The 12 hours didn't matter. You learn a lot about what you made assumptions about when an experiment that big fails not because the experiment itself but because of outside factors, like finding it and making sure the GPS was working and accurate and can withhold the right speeds.

TEM: Now that you've had time to reflect I wonder though if you see the amount 01:28:00of attention that it brought to science and yeast. Beyond the attention it brought to the company. It certainly was something that popular and accessible in a sort of science education way. I wonder if you're able, if there's been enough distance or if you've thought about that.

DG: It's hard to say because I don't' know if it worked. Because the CO2 depleted and it was out, you know, looking back I could have maybe tested the tiny little liquid in there to see if anything fermented. That's something, I totally maybe could have should have done is see did the yeast ferment, did it grow in the warm temperatures before it died? Did it try to ferment what was in 01:29:00there? I could have done that. I'm kind of wishing I had now. because that would have been telling. Then you know I left October 2014, early October and the second launch was end of October but it just didn't have the pizzazz you know? At that point the second launch there was only 4 strains being sent up and it was much more, what's the word I'm looking for?-just straightforward.

TEM: Like functional?

DG: Yeah, we just want this to work now so we can have space yeast. The magic was gone, I guess. Nikos and Jaime went to the launch and no one else did, 01:30:00whereas before we brought a whole big team out to the black rock desert.

The second launch just quietly passed and then ground control came out and it was a really big deal. Even though I didn't work at Ninkasi anymore, they were amazing. They invited me to all of the releases, all of the big events surrounding it. I mean, the reminiscing was really fun because it was about 6 or 8 months after the first launch that ground control came out and it was, you know? the whole thing is just sort of unbelievable.

TEM: What was that transition? So you left soon after. What was that transition 01:31:00out like for you?

DG: After that, you know the summer went by kind of nondescript. September came around and that's when-I had always told the home brewers that worked at Ninkasi, always told them whenever you have a home brew that you want tested bring it in. I'll do it for free, no problem. No big deal. Steadily over the last year of my career there, more and more home brewers were bringing in their home brews but also other breweries got word that I would do testing as like a favor. Sometime in September this growler of beer came in from a home brewer and 01:32:00he was like yeah this is my, I say now my mother's brother's cousin, but it was something like that. This is not my beer, this is twice-removed someone else's beer who wanted to get it tested. That was my big a-ha moment. I'm only helping one brewery when I'm working at Ninkasi. Lab services are needed. They're wanted and they're just in badly need of. We need to have some sort of affordable lab control for the brewers out there. They can't afford to drop $200 on one test just to find out it's just fine 2 weeks after it's already been on the shelves. 01:33:00That's not-so that's when it started rattling around was in September and that's when I started writing my business plan and I don't know, I think I just sort of that month I was so excited about Brew Lab and so I just wanted to do it and finally in the last week/first week of October, end of September, beginning of October, I just did it. I put in notice and left. It was terrifying. It was hard. Ninkasi, one of their core values is integration of work and life and 01:34:00having a good work-life balance and I really took that to heart. It was a family. You know-it was a family-not so mob-ish, but there's like a really strong community at Ninkasi. The more I learn about the beer industry and different breweries, I think that that's true in every brewery. There's a comradery, there's a-something I love about the beer industry is there' not just your coworkers. That's your friend. That's someone that does something else for the beer that you don't. That's honestly, and I think anyone that's left Ninkasi to pursue something else will say that the hardest, the absolute hardest part about leaving Ninkasi is the people, hands down.

It was scary. It was scary telling people that I was leaving to do this crazy idea in my garage but supportive. Everyone was supportive. So many breweries have told me, oh we were referred to you by Ninkasi. I don't think there's any hard feelings anyway, especially with the ground control that happened months after I left. But I mean that's kind of how it is in this industry. When you leave you're not shunning where you were, you're just moving on to the next place. My next place is here, BrewLab.

TEM: When you think about that community and think about ways that people who 01:36:00aren't directly linked to, well you're all directly linked to the beer, but people who aren't the brewers, what are some ways that you find support within the community?

DG: What do you mean?

TEM: I'm guess I'm hedging towards the pink boots society kind of idea, of forming organizations within a community to support-

DG: Okay, so Terri, she started Steelhead here, one of our oldest brew pubs. I think she started it in the 1980s?

TEM: I think so.

DG: Okay, shouldn't you know?

TEM: '89. I should know [laughs]. Yes I should.

DG: Some of our Eugene's most famous brewers worked under her-Jamie Floyd from Ninkasi started under Terri. I think it's that we all have so many connections to each other. It's such a small industry, and yet it's so big, it's growing. But the new breweries that are added are people who worked at a previous brewery. We all know each other. It's funny when I talk to someone from California and they name drop, I'm like who? I'm like I recognize the breweries and maybe one or two of the brewers but in Oregon there's such a tight community. One of the things I always tell people who don't have direct experience with the beer industry is that we don't use the word competition or competitive or competitor in this industry, we don't. We use collaboration. We 01:38:00use community. Those are the words used I think best to describe the beer communities. When you leave one place or go to another or start one you get support. I had so much support from Oakshire, from Ninkasi, from Widmer. All these places that I'd been working with and creating these relationships with at Ninkasi and they're the foundation of what made BrewLab work. You see brewers leave one brewery and go to another and improve the beer there and move to another brewery and improve the beer and then they say, you know why don't I just start my own? I think that there's that spirit of cutting your chops at 01:39:00some place local and well-known and then starting your own thing and then getting support from where you were. So much of that is in this industry. I actually hate saying the beer industry, because the industry is like InBev AB, MillerCoors, Heineken. The community is the craft. The community is Gilgamesh, it's in Salem. It's riverbend in Bend, it's Seven Brides in Silverton, Pelican in Astoria. We all have ties and connections. We all know each other and we know of each other and if not so-and-so can vouch for that. No one knocks people down 01:40:00in this industry and if they do the community speaks against it.

TEM: Is that an Oregon thing, or-?

DG: I don't think so and for example Lagunitas in I think it was early 2015, Lagunitas tried to sue Sierra Nevada over the font that they used for the letters IPA and beer consumers all over California and also in Oregon and Washington, most of the west coast I think cared the most was like what are you doing man? Sierra Nevada's been around way longer than you, not to mention who cares if the font looks the same, every beer is an IPA. Of course there's going to be some similarities and they dropped the lawsuit. I don't think it's just Oregon. I think it's this community. I think that when you look at it as an 01:41:00industry that's when you sell out. That's when you move to Heineken. You move to SAB Miller.

TEM: I think that's a nice transition into the, or maybe an answer, as to why do you stay doing this? What is it that you really, what fulfills you? maybe you've already spent an hour and a half saying that.

DG: Yeah, no it's okay. I mean it hasn't changed, really. The subject matter's changed. it's not chemistry and education. It's beer, science, and education. I still work really hard. I try really hard to not just give results but to provide do you need to bounce ideas off of me to figure out what went wrong, why your color is so low, why it is so high. Oh you don't like the IBU results. Well, let's talk about the process for this beer versus ones you've done in the 01:42:00past where your IBUs were accurate. Maybe your calculations are off. Maybe you're still using home brew calculations on a 10-barrel system. It's that I think that there's still a lot of education available out there for brewers on the science side. They've got the brewing down. They know it better than me. Right? they've been doing it longer. They've been doing it on different systems, different houses. Whatever. What I can provide is the scientific aspect. How can you use the data that you're collecting to actively make your beers consistent and always hit their targets? And how can I help so that when those targets aren't hit we can find a way to deal with that beer as a new entity, not as what it should have been. I mean, I still very much try to stick to the education 01:43:00aspects. Recently we did a science panel. We have an unusually high number of beer scientists in Eugene. We have Brian Koonz, who I incidentally graduated from college with in the chemistry program, but he opened the laboratory at Oakshire. I opened the one at Ninkasi. Then when I left Ninkasi they brought some new people in. We just have-you know Jason Curie, the main guy at Falling Sky is a biochemist. He worked at Stanford on the Human Genome Project. We have so many beer scientists here. That's really weird for this industry because there's not that many of us. To have such a high concentration in such a small town I was like let's get together and just do a panel. So we put together this beer science panel and we had about 30 or 40 home brewers and people in the industry come out and just nerd out with us and we got to just talk about beer 01:44:00science, discuss some of the latest changes in ASBC methods or discuss how home brewers can utilize sensory on their own brews. It was really cool still doing that bit of outreach and I also took a fellowship course at OMSI where I designed an experiment, a demo, for OMSI so once or twice a year I go up to Portland and I do this experimentation and there it is again, that outreach, that education with beer.

TEM: You certainly haven't been in the industry since the early '80s.

But I'm curious whether you think part of all of these opportunities, these 01:45:00synergistic opportunities, come from having such a large number of breweries and brewers and an engaged population in Oregon. Do you think that this is a sort of natural outcropping that then we'll be teaching our children about beer yeast.

DG: I can only hope that that's the case. I can only hope that beer becomes such a norm, good beer, quality, craft beer made down the street from me by my neighbor. I can only hope that that becomes so common. People are freaking out that we are at the same levels of pre-prohibition, like no we're not. The population of that time of the United States is an eighth of what it is now. In order to have the same levels, we need 8 times as many breweries and we'll get there. A brewery just opened a half hour after we talked. That's how fast it's 01:46:00happening. And it's awesome. It bothers me that there's so much negativity from the breweries that are already established. They're like oh there's no point to you opening another brewery. There's already so many. It's like no, no man. There's four main ingredients in beer: you've got water, malt, yeast, and hops. Under each one of those categories you have infinite amount of variables, which means there's an infinite amount of beers out there to be brewed. I always get the question, like isn't eventually all the breweries going to be-like no, no we're not even close. Those are just with the four main ingredients, once you start adding adjuncts like fruit, like honey, like oats, once you start adding those things in you increase the amount of beer that's available to make. I think it's just really important for each brewery to find their own niche. Brian 01:47:00Koonz who I was talking about from Oakshire, he left and started his own brewery called Alesong Brewing and Blending and they did their first brew for the KLCC Brewfest this past weekend but they've decided their niche is going to be barrel-aged Brett beers and some Saisons and some maybe not-so-sour sour beers. That's what they wanted to do. They're like we want to focus on the barrel age part. We wanted to focus on the unique, you only get this once in a life. We're not going to remake this beer ever. I think there's some other, like Stillwater does that and there's some other artisanal beers out there that do that. I think finding your niche, finding what about beer you're so passionate about: you like making IPAs? Make IPAs. Make a shit-ton of IPAs. Do what you love. Because as soon as you start brewing to someone else's schedule, as soon as you start 01:48:00listening to what the critics are saying you lose that bit of the brewery that was you. you lose that bit that spurred that passion. I'm excited there's more breweries opening. Not all of them are going to use Brew Lab or afford Brew Lab, even though I am the most affordable lab, there's still going to of course be some kick back. I don't need it. You know, whatever. But what I'm most looking forward to is for all we know the brewery that opened yesterday that's the next Sierra Nevada. That's the next New Belgium. That's the next Dogfish. It's exciting. People need to be excited. Not upset or angry or competitive. This is such an exciting time for us. We need to hold onto that. As soon as we start 01:49:00getting petty and competitive we're no better than InBev, no better than SAB Miller. Let's stick to the craft. Let's be inclusive. Let's do collaborations. Honestly, the negativity that I'm hearing is not coming from Oregon and I think that speaks a little bit to our state and in general just our brewers but I hope that all breweries take that to heart. You see that little struggling brewery down the street? Don't kick them down. Help them out. Do collaboration. Send a brewer over there to hang out. Teach them something. Help them be better. Because if the entire brewing industry just upped its quality, it's good for all of us.

It's better for the drinker. It's better for the consumer in general. It's better for your employees who can be proud of what they're contributing to. It's when that negativity and that competition and that hoarding of trade secrets, or whatever. I'm not saying share your recipes, but share your knowledge. Say hey we didn't buy that instrument here's why. We had to replace it two years later. Don't let other breweries make the mistakes you've made. Only in that capacity will we all improve, if that makes sense.

TEM: It does.

DG: Is that too idealistic, maybe?

TEM: I don't think so. I don't think so. Do you have any concluding thoughts? That feels so nice, that was a very nice.

DG: No, it was very conclusive. I mean of course the beer industry isn't all 01:51:00flowers and great beer and cheers to everyone. There's drama. There's rumors. There's backstabbing but it's just completely drowned out by the community and that's why I'm here. That's why I'm not in a classroom. I love working with brewers. I love walking into a brewery and seeing, you know you see the most, they're like this is my brew house. It was a brewhouse that I made from this brew house and that brewhouse and then I was like I don't have this whirlpool so I'll make one and it's all MacGyvered together and it's impressive because no one's doing it the exact same way and it's great. I think there's only, I think we 're at the precipice right now. We can decide to be exclusive and say 01:52:00breweries who were here before 2015 are old school and the originals and blah, blah, blah or we can be inclusive and say yeah, welcome. Join us. Help us improve beer in general. Let's get more out there. Let's stop competing for shelf space and tap handles. Let's just make more tap handles. Let's get more shelf space. We don't need to be negative. That's not us. That's not beer. That's my closing remark.

TEM: I know! That was good.