Summit Brewing Company has added an experienced Quality Manager to their staff, hiring Rebecca Newman to help monitor quality and consistency at the state’s second largest craft brewery. Newman comes to St. Paul after working with Sierra Nevada, Sam Adams, and Dogfish Head and her focus will be on maintaining quality across the entire brew process.

“In the late 1990's, I visited St. Paul and met Mark Stutrud and enjoyed my first Summit beer,” she recalls. “The beer is well constructed and not gimmick laden. It promotes honesty of ingredients, style, and flavor. Much like Mark, the beers are well intended and of the highest quality,” she says, which eventually drew her to join the team.

Since graduating from University of California-Davis in 1985, she has worked in the industry on projects such as developing the Samuel Adams lager glass, researching German hops for beer flavor and aroma, quantifying new methods of dry hopping, and evaluating flavor stability and aging characteristics of beer by style.

She comes to Summit with a plan to continue this path. “[I have] lots of projects ahead,” she says. Namely: “new beer styles, flavors and technology.” Her orientation at Summit has been focused so far on “Pantry Tastings,” in which they deconstruct beer flavors to work on pairing ideas, such as a recent experience of partnering peanut brittle with Summit’s True Brit IPA. “Who would’ve thought a dry-hopped IPA with delicious malt complexity would rock peanut brittle?” she says as she braces herself for the Midwest winter.

Founded in 1986, Summit recently released Unchained #5, an English-style barleywine. They are the state’s second largest craft brewery, after Schell’s, and ranked as the 28th largest in the country based on 2014 figures.