Firestone Quality Control Manager named one of Good Beer Hunting’s 2019 Signifiers

Meet Amy Crook. As our Quality Control Manager, Amy has one of the most important jobs at Firestone Walker and manages a team of 12 employees in four sectors within the lab department: sensory, microbiology, chemistry and packaging quality. She and her team oversee quality starting with raw ingredients and follows the beer from being brewed all the way until it’s packaged and on trucks for delivery.

“A lot can go wrong when brewing beer, especially on a large scale,” said Amy. “What we are looking for are the anomalies – meaning anything that is off, such as bacteria in the fermenter that shouldn’t be there, or when a beer color comes out too dark, etc. We are constantly checking the quality of our beers, so if an issue arises we can trace it back to the source and fix it before it expands and impacts larger quantities of our products.”

Amy and a handful of other craft beer visionaries were recently recognized as Good Beer Hunting’s 2019 Signifiers for “shaping the future of the industry”.  Read the full article here.

Amy has been with Firestone Walker for over five years where she first began as a lab intern. She graduated from California Polytechnic State University with a degree in food sciences and was hired on full-time, absorbing as much information as possible and quickly proving her knowledge.

Amy and her team think of themselves as problem solvers. They search for any potential issues that could arise in our beers and then discover ways to solve them. They also focus efforts on improving materials and ingredients to ensure fresh beer longer. In 2019, the team conducted over 200,000 quality control tests which average to around 17,000 tests per month. Each package of beer receives over 100 tests — now, that’s some fresh, quality beer!