These are the adult situations in beer production that we rarely talk about. Creativity is prized in craft brewing, but sustaining that creativity through nuts-and-bolts problem solving is critical to future opportunities. It’s the kind of ethos many of today’s craft brewers bring with them from previous careers in science and brewing at the macro level. Trials, efficiencies, panels, resourcing—these are not the vocabulary terms of a revolution. This is the language of a new—albeit still extremely small—establishment working hard to maintain its territory and forge ahead with a lot on the line. In this way, brewing Fresh Squeezed was more than a typical creative brewing exercise—it was an opportunity for Vega and Team Deschutes to tap into different parts of their collective brain under pressure. And that will pay dividends in future efforts.

“I’ve definitely seen a change in how we develop new brands,” she explains. “Like you said, for many years we had a luxury of just doing whatever the heck we wanted and putting that beer in front of folks and saying, 'What do you think?' Now, we really have to look at what hops are available and ask those questions out of the gate. Otherwise, you’re testing certain materials, and if they’re not available you’re wasting you’re R&D capacity and your time. You can make great beers for your pub, and we still do that, but anything that has a focus on scaling-up, we’re already asking forecast questions and looking at what we can secure. And then creativity comes with it. So it’s still highly creative, it’s just a different animal.”

When research and development becomes more than a creative outlet, and actually starts impacting the prospects of the business, it becomes highly investible. At Deschutes, that was an a-ha moment.

“We’re in the middle of bringing a pilot brewery online," Vega says. "It won’t be online until the end of next year, but it’s exciting in the R&D world because it will help with bringing plans to production. It will be in our production facility, so not only will it help with new product development, but it will help with any process testing. Think of Fresh Squeezed, and all those tests. The amount of effort it took to create the blends and test within a beer we were needing to keep consistent. That was super difficult. So I think it will be exciting for the production brewery to do these tests on a small scale and come up with answers a lot quicker without having to juggle our whole cellar and everything to make sure we’re still creating a consistent product.”