Sympathy for the Cellar Person
“A great cellar person will work to develop and maintain an intimate relationship [with the beer] in the tanks that they are taking care of,” said Gaby Serrano, production brewer at Humble Sea Brewing in Santa Cruz, Calif. “That means taking daily logs and pH readings, capping tanks as the beer nears the end of fermentation, doing sensory, harvesting yeast, purging brite tanks, lots of fermenter and brite tank CIPs [a cleaning cycle involving hot caustic, acid, and sanitizer], minimizing oxygen exposure to avoid oxidation all throughout the production process, and doing [hop] dumps on crashed tanks.”. If that sounds like a full plate of task-oriented tedium worse than Thanksgiving with your politically opposed side of the family, you’re not wrong.