BY WILLIAM DEAN
Looking insignificant by comparison, the slender man crouched beside the towering stainless-steel tank.
Inside, waiting, were several thousand gallons of finished beer. A hoppy IPA.
David Plechl siphoned off a trickle – enough to fill a clear plastic pitcher halfway.
The moment of truth was coming.
If the brew passed muster with Plechl and his band of “sensory tasters,” it would move on to the canning line and from there to all points in the Pacific Northwest.
Plechl is the last line of defense for Fort George Brewery in Astoria. Also, the first. He inspects and evaluates all of the raw materials as they arrive at the sprawling main brewing facility flanking the Columbia River.
But on this day in 2022, he was focused on the final result, and the verdict of the sensory panel wasn’t good. Plechl and the other tasters had detected an “off flavor” known as smoke taint.
That was puzzling, since the grain and hops used in the batch had been examined and cleared. Where was the smokiness coming from?
With help from the brewery’s lab and its technicians, Plechl would trace the problem to certain hops grown in Washington’s Yakima Valley. His deduction: The crop had been tainted by acrid smoke blowing into the region from wildfires.
Plechl also made a startling finding. The hops had concealed the damage at harvest and while being kilned and converted to pellets, only to release the taint at the end of the brewing process. Without a special test, the defect was nearly impossible to detect.
He alerted the supplier, a network of family farms, which immediately ran its own tests, reaching the same conclusion. Embarrassed by the breach in purity, the supplier credited the brewery for the shipment and worked with Plechl’s team to develop an advanced method of analysis.
The discovery rippled through the brewing industry. The detective work by Fort George was detailed in a presentation before the World Brewing Congress.
And the fate of the beer? It was rescued by blending the batch with enough normal IPA to effectively erase the smoky aroma and taste.
Looking back on the episode recently, Plechl flashed a look of satisfaction. Another mystery solved.
“There’s definitely a lot of sleuthing to it,” he said of his job.
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A native Oregonian, Plechl grew up in Salem and attended state colleges as a communication arts major.
He thought he’d be a journalist, and for a while he was, but beer was always in the picture.
While at the University of Oregon in the early 1990s he sampled a robust, hand-crafted Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and it blew his mind. “I was like, what’s going on here? It’s fruity. It’s floral. It’s pungent. It tasted great.”
With his Yugoslavian-born father’s support, he began making beer in his bedroom, armed with a copy of The Complete Joy of Home Brewing.
Years later, after doing some freelance writing in Portland, he moved to the North Coast. He began working as a reporter for the Chinook Observer, but the wages were scant and the luster soon wore off.
When a job popped up at Astoria’s Buoy Beer Co., he applied. Plechl (pronounced Pleckle) started out on the canning line filling cases but quickly impressed the bosses with his insatiable curiosity.
Within a few months, he was assisting brewers. Then he was on his own, bringing recipes to life on a large scale.
He’d notched four years at Buoy when he was enticed in 2021 to become Fort George’s first fulltime sensory tasting and quality control manager.
Plechl had zero experience in that area, but head brewer Michal Frankowicz liked his candor and fierce desire to learn.
“He’s very passionate about beer,” Frankowicz explained. “He was really interested in everything that went into a beer and talked about it in a way that most people wouldn’t.
“He’ll always speak his mind,” he added. “It literally doesn’t matter whether it’s a person on the floor or the owner of the company. He’ll speak the same way: ‘This is my two cents, take it or leave it.’”
Plechl found the job to be both challenging and nerve-wracking.
“It was scary at first,” he said. “I did feel this pressure, like, man, I can’t let a bad beer get packaged. I felt this responsibility for what goes into the keg or the can.”
The pressure gradually eased as he introduced a more formal, science-based process for evaluating beer quality – establishing twice-daily sensory panels and regular taster training.
“My guiding ethos was this: Even if we are just tasting the beer, we will learn stuff,” Plechl said.
Under his leadership, every beer – those aging in oak barrels included – is being tested and tasted, with the results dutifully entered into a computer. At the same time, more testing is being done in-house as the lab upgrades its equipment.
“It’s a lot,” Plechl said, taking a deep breath. “It’s every production batch. It’s every Vortex, not one out of three. Every time we have a tank [of beer], we’re going to taste it and run a sensory. And you’ll catch things, you know. There are times when it’s under-carbed or there’s a little bit of diacetyl [a buttery aftertaste] that people are picking up on. So, then we go, ‘Hey, let’s not package it. We’re going to blend with this other one into a larger tank.’ Usually there’s something you can do.”
Elevated quality control is a huge part of why Frankowicz declares, without hesitation, that the 17-year-old brewery is producing its best beer ever.
“It’s a night and day difference from even five years ago,” he said, “which is cool.”
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Who goes to a sensory training class when vomit is in the mix?
Earnest people like Shane Roberts.
Roberts has worked at Fort George for eight years, most recently as packaging manager. He’s become one of Plechl’s most dependable tasters, developing a refined palate.
On a recent Monday afternoon, Roberts aced his exam: a series of six brewery hypotheticals written by Plechl that ended with the question: “Which off flavor could this be?”
For the exercise, Plechl spiked three-ounce pours of Short Sands, a crisp lager, with all sorts of terrible things. The vomit scent came from drops of butyric acid.
Other samples were dosed with isovaleric acid (smells like stinky feet), mercaptan (rotten eggs), hydrogen sulfide (sulfur), lactic acid (sourness) and indole (fecal matter).
“They’re kind of rare, but I’ve encountered them,” Plechl said. “So, they do happen.”
Seated at a large square table in a commandeered conference room, Roberts approached his row of tasting glasses with a studious concentration. He wore the rubber boots that are part of his work uniform. Safety glasses were parked on top of his knit cap.
He sniffed, swirled and sipped, working his way from left to right.
Other panel members, men and women recruited from a variety of departments, did the same. Nobody said a word. Nobody betrayed any emotion. Not a single sour face, despite the foulness lurking in the glasses.
Afterward, Roberts said the actual tasting panels are fun but also extremely important. “We’ve come a long ways,” he said. “It’s made me appreciate each step of the process a lot more.”
Asked if he’s detected any serious off flavors, the bane of any batch, Roberts nodded.
“But they saved the beer,” he said with a smile.
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It’s an hour before sunrise when Plechl arrives at the brewery on a dreary Tuesday.
He uses the time to prepare for his usual morning tasting panel. Soon, he’s unloaded fresh glasses from the dishwasher and tapped a pitcher of Sherman IPA from a bright tank.
The beer is ready to be packaged, but sensory testing is required first. Plechl sets up a comparison between Sherman canned 10 days earlier and what he just drew from the tank.
The idea is to decide if the beers match the official description set by the head brewer, something known as being “true to target.” Sherman should be bold and slightly hazy, with a white foamy head, and tropical and grassy aromas and flavors.
Another goal is to evaluate whether the canned version is “aging out” too quickly.
On both scores, the beers do well, according to the evaluators. There are slight differences in aroma that Plechl decides is too minor to warrant further action.
“It’s pretty right on,” he said of the beer.
In sensory evaluation, a beer’s description takes on new importance. Far more than marketing hype, it’s what the brewery wants and expects from a recipe. If the recipe changes, so does the description.
Tasters are comparing the beer in front of them to the written summary. Even if there are no off flavors or other problems, the batch can still fail to pass if it doesn’t taste as intended.
Plechl has set off alarms for “fails” in almost every category, including prematurely aged-out beers, those that were supposed to be crystal clear but emerged cloudy, and those suffering from too much diacetyl, a natural byproduct of brewing.
“How is this happening?” he’d ask each time.
Sometimes it takes weeks for his team to figure out how a recipe went astray, using a process of elimination.
Frankowicz, who does his own share of pre-packaging tasting, always gets involved when a batch is at risk of being dumped – a rarity. In the history of the brewery there have only been two bacterial infections that required such drastic action, he said.
Plechl may be the bearer of bad news on occasion, but a tough conversation with a frustrated brewer is better than putting sub-par beer on supermarket shelves.
“If I was just telling you what you want to hear,” the sensory man said, “I wouldn’t be doing my job.”
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WILLIAM DEAN is a novelist and former investigative journalist who enjoys writing about the art of craft brewing. Astoria Beer Zone is his blog.
This article originally appeared in the January 2025 edition of HIPFiSH Monthly.
