Hix Farm Brewery Customer Success Story

The brewery — and the problem

Hix Farm Brewery is a local, farmhouse-style brewery focused on high-gravity craft beer — the kind of stylistic territory (saisons, Bret beers, barrel-aged sours and strong ales) where yeast handling is the entire game. The team approached Pro-Lab Diagnostics with a specific concern: yeast sterility. Open transfers from slant to starter to propagation flask were happening on a regular benchtop, and any contaminating organism that slipped in early would have a full fermentation cycle to express itself in the finished beer.

For craft brewers, the spoilage list is short but ruthless. Lactobacillus brevis and Pediococcus damnosus produce ropiness, diacetyl and sour off-flavors. Brettanomyces bruxellensis introduces phenolic “barnyard” and “horse-blanket” notes that may be desirable in one style and ruinous in another. Non-Saccharomyces wild yeasts — the kind that hitchhike on grain dust, fruit, or wood — can ferment beyond the intended terminal gravity, over-attenuate, and gush packaged product.

Step one — protect the yeast at the bench

Before any molecular work made sense, the upstream contamination path had to be closed. Pro-Lab specified the Pro-Safe Vertical Laminar Flow Hood / Clean Bench (Model PLS362). The unit draws room air through a HEPA filter and delivers a unidirectional, laminar curtain across the work surface, sweeping dust, skin flakes, and airborne microbes away from open vessels and toward the operator. It is not a biosafety cabinet — it protects the product, not the user — which is exactly the right tool for yeast slants, agar plates, propagation flasks, and pitching.

With the clean bench in place, Hix Farm's brewmaster could open vessels, flame loops, and transfer pure culture without worrying about every door slam or HVAC cycle in the production area.

science Recommended for Brewery QC Optigene Genie® LAMP — for brewery QC of spoilage organisms Single-temperature isothermal amplification with melt-curve discrimination. Positive/negative call in 15–30 minutes from wort, fermenter, packaged beer, or surface swabs. No thermocycler required. arrow_forward

Step two — LAMP for fast, in-house spoilage screening

A clean bench prevents introductions; a screening assay catches the ones that get through anyway. Hix Farm added an Optigene Genie® instrument and brewery-relevant LAMP assays for Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, Brettanomyces, and wild yeasts. LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) runs at a single temperature around 65°C, requires no thermocycler, and returns a positive/negative call in 15–30 minutes — with melt-curve analysis on the Genie® platform to discriminate target from non-target amplification.

That fits a craft brewery's workflow. A QC lead can pull a wort sample at pitch, a fermenter sample mid-fermentation, and a packaged-beer sample pre-release, run them on the same instrument, and have a confidence call before the beer leaves the warehouse. There is no off-site lab turnaround, no thermocycler footprint, and no PhD molecular biologist required at the bench.

Step three — supporting cold chain and reference stock

To keep yeast banks and reference strains in good order, Hix Farm preserves house yeast and known spoilage controls on Microbank® beads — ~25 retrievals per vial, no freeze-thaw cycling of the master stock. Confirmation work at the bench uses Pro-Lab Pro-Stains (Gram stain, lactophenol cotton blue for fungal morphology) and traditional Lancefield-style latex reagents from the /pro-mag/-supported molecular workflow on the rare occasions a clinical-microbiology confirmation is warranted.

The result

The brewmaster's summary, in their own words: the new setup produces “tasty and consistent brews… every time.” In a high-gravity, farmhouse-style program where one off-batch can cost weeks of tank time and an entire packaging run, the combination of upstream contamination control (clean bench) and downstream verification (LAMP screening) is what gives the brewer confidence to release product on schedule.

“The head brewmaster at Hix Farm Brewery says they chose to do business with us based on our value-pricing and the transparency of products and knowledge on our website.”

Why this matters beyond Hix Farm

The Hix Farm program is a template any small-to-mid craft brewery can copy. The hard part of brewery microbiology has never been the science — the spoilage organism list is well-defined, and the LAMP and laminar-flow tools are mature. The hard part is sourcing the right equipment at the right price point, with documentation a brewer can actually read. Pro-Lab supplies Genie® instruments and mastermix, Microbank® preservation beads, Pro-Stains for visual confirmation, and Pro-Safe clean-bench hardware directly from manufacturer — the same catalogue Hix Farm used to build out their QC bench.

Frequently Asked Questions

If your brewery is scoping out a QC program — clean bench, LAMP, yeast banking, stains — contact info@pro-lab.us or visit the Optigene Genie® product page to see the instrument Hix Farm uses for spoilage-organism screening.