In the 1990s, amid U.S. craft beer’s initial boom, quality wasn’t an overwhelming concern for the nation’s microbreweries.

It should have been.

As some of the craft brewers that now rank among the nation’s largest began to find their footing, there was a layer of the brewing community far more concerned with craft beer’s potential riches than with the beer itself. They saw the buttery diacetyl of the early British-style beers from New England not as an exceptional flaw for English and Scottish ales and the occasional Czech or Vienna lagers, but as a rule for their entire line of beers. They became enamored of gimmicky labels and TGI Friday’s-inspired brewpubs, but not in the beer behind them.

Many of them also didn’t last. Though the number of breweries in the U.S. climbed from 284 in 1990 to 1,564 by 1999, that peak led to a steep slide that left the U.S. with nearly 120 fewer breweries by 2005.

“ If you want to stay in business for more than a couple of years, you’d better be making some really great beer. It’s only getting more competitive out there. ” — Neil Witte, founder of Craft Quality Solutions

The current craft beer boom, however, increased the number of breweries in the U.S. from 1,447 in 2005 to 5,005 at the end of 2016. That’s a 346% increase that still lags the 550% jump from 1990 to 1999, but is finally showing signs of slowing.

According to Brewbound and IRI Worldwide, craft beer’s growth slowed to 4% by volume last year, the first time it hasn’t increased by double-digit percentage points since 2004. Even the Brewers Association craft beer industry group notes that the 8% growth it saw by the middle of 2016 represents “a period of maturation” for craft beer.

As it stands, craft beer’s huge growth has balanced out some growing losses. Before 2013 and 2014, when there were 1,275 U.S. — or roughly a quarter of the breweries that exist today, it was rare for the U.S. to lose more than 20 production breweries in a year. In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. lost 79. If you throw brewpubs into that mix, the U.S. lost 126 breweries in those two years alone. In 2015, the last year for which data was available, 67 breweries went out of business.

Even the Brewers Association thinks beer quality may be at least part of the problem. In 2014, the BA’s Technical Committee set up a subcommittee dedicated to beer quality. It created a pyramid of priorities for brewers to address, produced a series of publications to help brewers and, last year, named a quality ambassador to speak to state brewers guilds about beer quality.

In 2016, that duty fell to Elysian Brewing co-founder and former brewmaster Dick Cantwell. This year, former Boulevard Brewing brewer Neil Witte takes on that responsibility. A former field quality liaison for Boulevard’s parent company, Duvel USA, Witte has spent this year setting up his own business, Craft Quality Solutions, to help brewers with quality problems, including the cleaning of tap lines and keg equipment and the management of out-of-date beer.

Neil Witte, founder of Craft Quality Solutions Brewers Association

Witte first jumped on with Boulevard in 1997 and remembers all too well what happened to brewers from that era when the first great craft beer shakeout began. He’s aware of the role quality played in the demise of many brewers, and he’ll be talking to brewers groups across the country this year to ensure that their breweries don’t suffer a similar fate. In anticipation of his tour, we got him to talk to us about the importance of beer quality, the cost of producing a flawless brew and the increasing importance of craft beer’s first impression on new drinkers:

MarketWatch: What does the BA have you doing in your first days as “quality ambassador”?

Neil Witte: The gist of what I’m going to be doing is not so much technical stuff. I haven’t put together a framework for my talk completely yet, but a lot of where I come from in the industry is working outside of the scope of what a brewer would traditionally think of as a necessary element of quality.

I’ve been in field quality — what happens to your beer out in the marketplace — for a long time, and that’s what I’m doing with my new business, Craft Quality Solutions. I think that’s an element of the business that’s been overlooked. There are a lot of people who pay a little attention to field quality, but there aren’t many people who pay a lot of attention to it.

There are also things on the front end of a quality program for a brewer: Just basic things like ensuring the quality and safety of certain ingredients you get as raw materials for producing beer. I think there are some elements of a quality program on both ends that may be overlooked, so the general theme I’m going for is emphasizing the breadth of a quality program, determining what a quality program means to a brewer and trying to make it not so intimidating. I won’t be doing so much a technical talk — “Here’s how you take a sterile sample, here’s how you do a cell count” — it’ll be more of a broad scope.

When you ask your average brewer what they do to maintain quality in their beer, they’ll talk about stuff like yeast cell counts and viable counts. If they’re packaging, they’ll check CO2 and oxygen and things like that: All the basic things that you can think of with a quality program. But they’re not necessarily thinking of checking draft lines if they’re a distributed brewery or having some type of structure for checking date codes — or, on the front end, ensuring that the fruit juice they put in their fruit IPA is of quality. There’s a lot more to a quality program than a brewer might think.

MarketWatch: In talking to some of the longer-tenured brewers, it seems like field quality was originally a big portion of their business. There are stories of brewers going out and cleaning tap lines at their bar accounts or fielding calls in the middle of the night if the beer wasn’t tasting right or their kegs were acting up. Have brewers gotten away from that hands-on approach?

Witte: It depends on the brewer. There are a handful of brewers who have dedicated field quality representatives who are actively working in the marketplace. A few of them have a whole team dedicated to field quality matters.

However, a lot of packaging breweries and craft brewers don’t really have anyone dedicated to that. It’s not that they aren’t paying attention to it: They may have salespeople checking on date codes at their different accounts, or maybe they’re leaning on distributors. They may have it written into their contract that the distributor needs to pick up out-of-code beer when they find it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that kind of stuff is happening the way it should.

That’s what I was getting at when I said that a lot of people were paying a little attention to field quality. If you’re in 10 major markets with your brewery and you have three or four sales reps, those reps are probably busy selling beer and setting up programming with distributors and things like that. Often times, checking date codes and looking at draft systems a little bit closer and evaluating the cleanliness of draft systems can get pushed by the wayside.

When I was with Boulevard, we had a system set up with our sales reps where they had quality audits that they did every month. They’d have to go in and look at draft systems and check the cleanliness of the coupler and the faucet and sample the beer with an eye toward any type of off flavors that would come from a dirty draft line. They all got training on that and learned how to identify a diacetyl infection [that makes beer taste buttery] or a lactobacillus infection [that would give beer a sour characteristic]. We were focused on that and that was my job, so we were a little bit more on top of it than a lot of other brewers were.

I think some brewers do a better job of it than others. I don’t know that brewers have gotten away from it, since I’m not so sure that it was a major focus of everyone to begin with. There’s always been some attention paid to it, but not that much attention to it.

MarketWatch: Does this become more important as breweries proliferate? It seems like just a couple of years ago, you could have a distributor handle some of this load for you. But if the distributor has taken more brands on their truck, it would seem that they’d have less time to dedicate to your brand specifically. Does that make representatives more important in a crowded marketplace?

Witte: Sure. Depending on who you are and your position with your distributor, you may not have a lot of pull to be vigilant about this.

Some distributors are better about field quality issues than others, and the sad part of it is that a lot of craft brewers are kind of stuck in a distributor marriage that may be less than desirable. Maybe they’re the No. 18 priority among the 20 breweries that the distributor has in house, so that’s a bad situation. In that situation, brewers have to take on those responsibilities themselves and, in general, it’s just a good idea to take on those responsibilities themselves.

It’s great when you can have a distribution partner who’s as dedicated to quality as you are and takes it seriously, but even in that case you have to be engaged yourself. I don’t think that there are breweries that farm out lab work to other breweries without following up to see if it’s done correctly. In the instance of field quality, it behooves you to make sure you’re following up on that as well.

MarketWatch: After the craft beer boom of the 1990s leveled out, there was a lot of discussion about the quality of beer and the roll that it played in declining brewery numbers. What lessons did you take away from that period, and are any of the same flaws starting to creep their way back into modern craft beer?

Witte: I think we’re at a point right now where we may be learning some of those lessons that people were forced to learn in the late ’90s.

The quality issue is really top of mind for anyone who was involved in the industry in the middle- to late-’90s. I remember going to my first Great American Beer Festival in 1996 and then going in ’97 and ’98 and ’99. By the time I’d been in the industry awhile in the late ’90s and going to some of these festivals, I realized that I was lucky to be working for a brewery that made really good beer, but that there were a lot of people making very bad beer, too. There was just a lot of bad beer out there and it was affecting everybody and the industry as a whole. Quality eventually got a lot better, but the barrier for entry into the brewing business is so low now that you can get into the industry a lot cheaper than you’ve ever been able to before — at least in modern history.

There are a lot of people getting into it that aren’t doing things the right way, and there’s a lot of mediocre beer out there. I wouldn’t say that I’ve had as much straight-up bad beer as I did in the mid- to late-’90s, but the overall quality has yielded a lot more mediocre and bad beer than there was even 10 years ago, that’s for sure. We’ve peaked and we’re kind of lagging a bit now. It’s important that brewers pay attention to little details, because it’s still a situation where a rising tide lifts all boats. It’s a lot more competitive than it used to be, but craft brewers are still dependent on the whole scene improving.

It’s easy to stay inside your craft-beer bubble and say “yeah, everybody drinks craft beer, since everybody I know drinks craft beer and all my friends drink craft beer.” But craft beer is still small, and there’s a lot of growth that the industry can experience. There are still a lot of beer drinkers out there who have either never tried craft beer or maybe had a bad experience and stayed away. We still can’t afford to screw up that first sampling opportunity.

I’ve always told people that if someone had a bad Bud Light on draft, they would blame the retailer. They wouldn’t blame Budweiser or Anheuser-Busch BUD, +1.08% they would just order a bottle instead. If they had bad craft beer on tap, they would blame the brewery if that was the first time they had it. I think we’re also in a situation where if someone also has a bad craft beer at retail, they won’t just blame that brewery, they would just blame craft beer. They may not know it’s a line-cleaning issue or out-of-code beer: They may just think “that’s what craft beer is and maybe it’s not for me.”

We’re not in a place as an industry where we can be losing customers to a bad first experience, and I think it’s just as applicable now as it was in the ’90s.

MarketWatch: Is the customer base helping brewers at all? Craft beer is still just 12% of the overall beer market by volume, but that’s still considerably more than it was half a decade ago. Are more informed drinkers and their feedback through social media, apps and other digital channels helping brewers identify quality concerns more quickly?

Witte: I think social media is pretty influential right now in beer. I say that generally speaking, since it’s hard to tell if it’s a vocal minority. You know as well as I do how social media can be in the beer world, but there’s no denying that it can have an influence on the way brewers behave now.

But we have a more educated beer drinker now. While we still have a lot of progress to make as an industry and there are beer drinkers we haven’t reached yet, those we have reached are way more educated than they were 10 or 20 years ago. We’ve got totally different beers available now. Back in the day, everybody had their pale ale and their porter, their three or four core brands that they rode with. Now everybody’s drinking IPAs, and IPA basically didn’t exist when I got into the business: Basically [Anchor Brewery’s] Liberty Ale was the only IPA out there, and it was this strange creature of a beer.

But we have a more educated drinker now and I’m seeing a lot more on social media about quality and what’s going on with breweries. Just based on the sheer volume of the things I see, especially working outside of one particular brewery and working in the greater industry, there are lot more things that are potential issues out there.

MarketWatch: As you mentioned, that new diversity of beer styles among U.S. brewers has yielded an increasing use of adjunct ingredients in beer. We’ve seen a spike in the use of fruit, juices, coffee, chocolate and sodas in popular U.S. beer brands during the past few years. How much more complicated does that make it for brewers to ensure the quality of the beer they’re making?

Witte: It just brings in a whole other element of stuff that you’re putting into beer. It makes your supply chain more complicated and it’s just that many more things that you need to be concerned about.

We’re putting things in beer that have the potential of being unsafe in the way that traditional brewing ingredients don’t really have. Working with sugary syrups and fruit juices and things like that, there are a lot more potential quality issues that can come up with that than with malted barley and hops. It complicates things quite a bit. While we’re fortunate that we work in an industry where food safety issues don’t pop up in the same way — being as it’s an alcoholic beverage and there’s a certain protection from pathogens — we can’t rely on that 100% and say “that can never happen.” We still need to pay attention to those things, especially with the amount of other ingredients that people are using.

MarketWatch: Do you feel there’s more public scrutiny of beer quality now? From Guinness’ use of fish bladders, German brewers’ discovering refrigerant in their beer two years ago to Sierra Nevada having difficulty with some of their bottles, it seems like beer quality receives more attention than it did in years past. Does that make it more important for brewers to broaden their quality programs and revisit quality programs they’ve put together in years past?

Witte: Yeah. It’s a dynamic industry and things are changing all the time.

Even if you’re making the same beer all the time and you have your five or six core beers that are the same that they were five years ago, you might be doing things differently. You need to stay on top of your processes. You might have a new piece of equipment, or maybe you’re sourcing your malted barley from a different place, maybe you have some new procedures in place, maybe you have a new glass manufacturer.

It’s the same business, but it doesn’t mean you’re doing the exact same things. Very few breweries, I suspect, have the exact same processes with the exact same things going on exactly the way they were five years ago. You have to stay on top of those changes, and that’s why you have to have a comprehensive quality program. It’s more like having quality as a mentality: It’s trying to anticipate the different process points where something bad could happen, whether that’s making bad beer or potentially causing some type of safety hazard. What can you do to prevent that?

The big breweries that have well-developed quality programs understand this, for the most part, and a well-developed quality program is going to adapt and evolve. Always keep thinking about where that next control point is that might pop up and wasn’t there before.

MarketWatch: Boulevard grew exponentially during your time there, even before it was sold to Duvel USA in 2013. How do scale and acquisitions affect quality management and how did you have to adapt as Boulevard was changing and growing?

Witte: When I started with Boulevard, we had probably 25 employees and were making about 35,000 or 40,000 barrels a year. Now, they made close to 200,000 barrels last year.

In the time I was there, at the beginning, anything we did that was quality related was through brewers and the brewmaster. I started there as a brewer in 1997 and we had a microscope and a countertop where some basic things got accomplished. We were doing some rough yeast analysis and cell counts. We didn’t have a developed sensory program, we weren’t doing any micro-testing, but as we got bigger, we started to implement things in a pretty systematic fashion.

I got to see it develop into a full-fledged quality program with a micro lab and a physical lab, a sink and maybe four or five full-time people. It wasn’t any big leap all at once: It was incremental growth and recognizing that “OK, we’re a little bit bigger now, let’s start checking for this.” It’s part of our DNA in the brewery — that quality mentality.

It’s kind of like when you’re scrubbing the floor in the brewery and you see that dark corner where nobody looks: Are you going to spend the extra time to clean out that corner and make sure it’s spotless? Because the dirt in that corner is not going to jump right up and jump into your fermenter, but if you’re cutting corners and you’re not spending the time to scrub every inch of the floor when it’s time to scrub the floors, that’s part of your mentality. Now you’re cutting corners on other things, and so we always had a mentality at Boulevard that we did things all the way and did them the right way.

As a direct example of those clean floors, people would always compliment me when I showed them through the brewery and would comment on how spotless the brewery was. Everything, top to bottom. That was because we gave a shit about it, a lot. That was the mentality that we had: That we were going to do everything possible to make sure that we were completely buttoned up and doing all we could to make the best beer, and cleaning was a part of that.

As we grew, we added more and more processes and the quality program grew from that mentality.

MarketWatch: There’s so much at stake for startup breweries with so many other brewers already in the field. The rule of thumb used to be that you got your financing in order, got your business person on board, got your brewer on board and started your brewery. Is it now a necessity for a brewer to have some sort of lab program right off the bat?

Witte: The short answer is yes, but you also have to define what a lab program is.

If you’re a small brewer, a proper lab with a lab technician costs money and is a significant investment. A dedicated quality person is something a lot of startup brewers can’t afford, so they’re taking it on themselves. A quality program is really just the collection of all the things that you do in a brewery to make sure you have a high-quality beer. It’s checking pH of your mash, it’s doing iodine tests to check for starch conversion, it’s doing a yeast cell count: It’s doing the super basic things that all brewers should be doing. That constitutes a proper laboratory, so to speak, even though you might not have the physical laboratory.

All brewers have to do some kinds of quality checks and, for the most part, have a quality program even if they don’t call it that.

MarketWatch: When you see beer of lower quality enter the marketplace, what are brewers typically missing? What portion of the process is making that beer less than it could be?

Witte: There are a couple of ways to answer that question, but one is the one I’m most exposed to because it’s the nature of my work, specifically, in field quality.

I’ve always been kind of an evangelist for field quality, draft-line maintenance and draft-system specifications and date coding. I think that may be where people are screwing things up the most. That is even evident when you go to a beer festival and get an IPA that isn’t all that fresh. I met someone a few weeks ago and they were running around, selling their beer and giving out samples — and I had not had their beer before — and they gave me some samples of it, I went home, I poured the IPA in the glass and it was old. I looked at the date and it was six months old, and that’s what they were going to retail with and saying, “Hey, this is my beer, do you want to pick it up, buy a few cases and put it on tap?”

It’s a problem. Part of that is recognizing that aspect of it: That you need to be vigilant about things that happen outside the brewery.

Beyond that, all things considered, there’s a tendency for brewers to just not, I don’t know, there’s just a whole host of really small things in the brewhouse. Like if you come up with a recipe, make your beer and it’s just OK. There’s just a lot of OK beer out there, and continuous improvement is something that, maybe, is lacking as well.

There’s the hesitancy of brewers to release beer that doesn’t meet their standards, but also to dump the beer when it doesn’t meet their standards and just release it anyway. I get the feeling sometimes when I drink somebody’s beer that “maybe you aren’t as proud of this as you could be, but you don’t want to bite the bullet and dump the batch.” At Boulevard, we had to dump a lot of beer down the drain when it wasn’t right, and that’s part of being a good brewer: Being able to say, “You know what, there was this one little screwup in the process and while this beer isn’t terrible, we’re going to dump it.”

Maybe it was something we couldn’t blend away, but that would happen sometimes and it sucked.

MarketWatch: From a cost-benefit standpoint, where do you see the immediate reward in dumping batches of beer, investing in quality-management personnel, investing in lab techs and other quality-focused elements that brewers may be hesitant to pay for?

Witte: In a land of 5,000 breweries, if you’re not making amazing beer, you’re probably not going to stay in business.

It’s easier to make really great beer a couple of times in a brewery. It’s really hard to make really great beer every time you brew. To make really great beer every time you brew, you have to have those quality processes in place. You have to pay attention to detail. You have to have quality as a mindset. That’s survival in this business: If your beer is not good, you’re not going to be around for the long haul.

If you want to stay in business for more than a couple of years, you’d better be making some really great beer. It’s only getting more competitive out there. Quality isn’t like adding a piece of equipment, where you can calculate a hard-and-fast return on investment. Investing in a quality program is understanding that you’re investing in the sustainability of your business.

You can get by with making OK beer for a little while, especially when you’re the hot local thing. If you don’t figure it out and you just ride being local and new, you might be in for a wakeup call when the next new brewery opens up. It’s harder to put a firm number on quality, but anybody who’s been in this business for more than a few years knows that it’s worth it.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.