Monday, May 25, 2009

Application Mailed!

We’ve been working hard over the last 6 weeks or so going through the process to get certified organic and today, we mailed in the application!

The process of getting certified is quite a challenge. It involves much more than just using certified organic raw materials and requires a crazy amount of documentation. After going through the process though, there will be a couple cool things we can do. For example, we could trace back from any bottle or keg of our beer which batch of beer it was, what lot of grain and hops went into that batch, where it was malted and which farm grew it! Crazy.

We needed a tremendous amount of help to get our record keeping and process documentation ready for the certifier, and we were very fortunate to get that help from our intern, Anne Morin. Anne is graduating from University of Guelph’s Alfred College campus in quality assurance and nutrition and she was responsible for getting us up to speed. We’ve hired her for the rest of the summer to help us make sure we stay compliant and also research more enviro-cool things we can do.

The application itself is hundreds of pages long, documenting every cleaning procedure, every quality assurance program and tracking procedures for every ingredient for every brand. I weighed the thing and its 1.5lbs of paperwork!