UO alumna Dana Garves, BS ’10 (chemistry), is the queen of quality fermentation.
Her business, Oregon BrewLab, is one of only a few facilities in the country to provide low-cost fermentation quality analysis. But the trail blazing doesn’t stop there: this female-owned business doesn’t just fill a void in a male-dominated industry, it has opinions and isn’t afraid of voicing them.
Garves, a Seattle native attracted by the UO’s environmental chemistry program, only settled on her major after first realizing that she wasn’t all that good at it. She struggled with it from the outset, and decided she had to get better at it. After graduation, her first job was in water testing—she was thrown in the deep end, figuratively, and quickly became acquainted with quality control and assurance in the field. The job was unfulfilling and uninspiring, though, and she set out to find something she was truly passionate about.
That turned out to be beer.
She was hired by Ninkasi Brewing in Eugene, and built the brewery’s lab from the ground up. Way up—she even led the brewery’s effort to send yeast to space.
During her four years as a lab technician at Ninkasi, she was exposed to a growing need in the craft beer industry: quality control.
“At the time, a brewery in Eugene was getting ready to release a big beer and they were worried about an infection in it,” Garves said. “They asked me to confirm if there was an infection and what the price would be to test it in Ninkasi’s lab. I didn’t know what to say, so I said the price to test is a bottle of beer to sample.
“After that, it started snowballing. It was mostly Eugene breweries at first, and then Astoria, Portland, and Bend breweries, and then out-of-state breweries. The ‘aha!’ moment was when a Michigan beer in a growler made its way out to the lab for a series of tests. I asked myself, ‘Isn’t there a service for this? Am I really the only option?’”
Garves turned the demand into a viable business. In late 2014, she started Oregon BrewLab to provide fermentation lovers (commercial brewers, home brewers, cideries, meaderies, and kombucha enthusiasts) a reliable and low-cost resource to ensure quality control across product lines.
Oregon BrewLab aims to provide quality control analysis with digital results in two days or less, for $20 or less per test. International bitterness units (IBU), alcohol by volume (ABV), color, nutrition analyses, and a host of other services are offered, all aimed to provide accurate data for fermentation specialists.
BrewLab’s tagline of “Brew, Test, Perfect” describes more than just the services Garves offers, but captures her work process and ethic as well.
“I want you to brew a beer, and if it doesn’t meet your expectations, I want you to brew again and improve with the knowledge you gained,” she said. “Conversely, I’m going to keep doing BrewLab, but each time I’m going to do it a little bit better. I’m going to test it, see if it works, and do it again with another iteration. It’s all ingrained from the scientific process.”
After only four years in business, Garves has 250 clients in the United States and abroad. Her success can be attributed in part to finding her unique market niche, and harnessing a dynamic work process to offer increasingly valuable services.
However, her willingness to stand up as a proud female chemist in a hugely male-dominated industry is making waves as well.
She recalls a time she received a beer to test with a label that suggested women take their shirts off. Garves wasn’t having it. “I was very aware of being around only men in the meeting, and they thought it was acceptable to hand me this beer, with a derogatory pun,” she said. “They were reminding me of my place, and it wasn’t lost on me. While the brewery later apologized, they also never worked with me again. I haven’t gotten any beer to test since that meeting.”
What Garves faces in the brewing industry is what many women in many industries continue to face. Do they continue to press issues and fight for equality in the workplace? Do they do this at the expense of business? Garves, like many women, didn’t elect to be a feminist champion out of choice, but rather out of necessity. If the options are ‘Say nothing with no progress’ or ‘Speak up, sometimes begrudgingly, and push colleagues out of their comfort zones,’ Garves chooses option B.
"Women are struggling in the brewing industry,” said Garves. “It’s not easy, you have to fight some things occasionally. You get a hug when everyone else gets handshakes. Your thoughts are revoiced by a male and he gets the credit for the idea.”
However, Garves is quick to note that she feels lucky to be in her industry. She is grateful for the allies she’s identified, and knows that things could be much worse. She’s hopeful that the industry doesn’t have scandals to uncover, and is doing the small things she can now as a business owner to keep forward progress throughout the industry. After spending seven years drinking only with men, she’s helped carve out a space for women to drink, network, and appreciate beer with a women’s only beer drinking group, XX Ounce.
At the end of the day, she wants to help make and drink good beer. And if she needs to fight a couple battles along the way, count her in.
Dana Garves embodies the spirit of equality in every aspect of her business—from speaking out directly to clients to blogging on her company’s website on controversial brewery sellouts. She’s a female, she’s a business owner, and she’s changing her industry.
Oh, and it’s safe to say she’s pretty good at chemistry now, too.
- Meredith Ledbetter, writing and editing associate
Front page image by Kiley Gwynn. Main image, showing Garves heading to the launch site to send brewer's yeast into space, by Lisa McAuliffe.