PLAATO and Apogee Brewing: A Look Inside the Fermentation Profile of GABF Award-winning Beer 'Lucy Loves Rye'

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 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.

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:

"So as 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" 

About PLAATO

PLAATO provides leading production optimization tools and fermentation monitoring to breweries, focused on capturing and monitoring critical data and providing insights to identify and solve production bottlenecks. We partner with our customers for the long run and are thrilled to collaborate with some of the leading breweries. Our 300+ customers are located in all six continents and more than 40 countries. Congratulations from the PLAATO team on the amazing awards achieved at GABF!