 Hi, this is Jeff Rick with The Key. We are on the ground at the Gordon Beer Brewery in downtown San Jose, California to really get a look at tech and innovation and everybody's favorite thing, beer, right? Everybody likes beer in tech. So I'm joined here with Justin Bully. He's the head brewery. So Justin, welcome. Welcome. Yeah, thanks. So we first set this up because I saw Dan Gordon speak a little while ago and he's a zealot when it comes to the German purity laws and talks quite a lot that he follows those things to the letter. But at the same time, you're in the heart of Silicon Valley, we're in the brew master's room here and I feel like I'm in a data center control room or at an airport or something. So talk a little bit about what you guys are doing here in terms of tech and innovation yet still staying true to those purity laws. Sure. The purity law, it's called the Reinhardtskabot, it goes actually back to 1516 and it's actually the first food safety law ever. Simply what it states is beer can only be made with four ingredients, which are malted barley, water, yeast, and hops. So we adhere to that because Dan studied at the Technical University of Munich, the Weinsteffen campus, and he really believes in making authentic German style loggers. Technology-wise, the name of the game in professional brewing is to make the most amount of product with the least amount of raw materials without compromising quality or consistency. So what is quality? Dan studied at Weinsteffen, like I said, we make all authentic German style loggers, so without going on a great tangent there, that's the quality. Consistency, I utilize this program right behind you guys, it's called the trend graphing program, and we have a quality control department in a lab, and then we use our Nair-Winbru automation that you can see behind us here. So the automation allows us to keep things consistent. So what oftentimes people don't realize is that the raw materials coming into the plant are changing, they're dynamic. So we have to make both proactive decisions and reactive decisions constantly to keep our product consistent. So talk a little bit about some of the things you could do now that you couldn't do before leveraging these types of technology. So the automation, it's been around for some time. We've had it here since the beginning, and really humans make mistakes, computers make less, unless I guess the programmers made them. So this has been here since the beginning, the trend graphing program is really new. So we'll track every constituent within the beer, and we'll make reactive decisions to accomplish that. So, and how much of this stuff is off the shelf, and how much of it did you guys build, or did you build any of it? So that's another thing that's specific to the Silicon Valley here, is that the technology is everywhere, the world's flat. You can almost get a drone to deliver you a Microsoft package. It's not already in the plan. A beer, I don't want a Microsoft package, I don't want a beer. So did you build any of it yourself, or you work with startups? So that's the great thing is that the workforce here is the same guy that's dragging the hose can help program some of our graphs and work on all the programming here. So it's really just the quality of the workforce here in the Silicon Valley that helps us with that. So let's talk about the tech that more people are interested in that you know, how do you go from four basic ingredients to create the plethora of different types of beer that you guys output from here? So to explain that, I guess one of the main ingredients is molted barley. So by adjusting anything within the brewing process, we could make many of the different styles. But the first thing is molted barley has this full spectrum of malt to choose from. So beers are made with different ratios of these types of malt. And some of the darker beers use darker malt. All beers are predominantly a pale malt. But along the brewing process, we would make minor changes to every single style to create these different style beers. And related to the proactive and reactive decisions that allows consistency, we have three brews. It takes three brews to fill up one fermenter. So let's say we don't hit the bullseye. We have the first brew be slightly bitter, for instance. We would make the second brew be proportionally less bitter. So really that allows us to have consistency. We can shoot for the bullseye within the bullseye. Our bullseye is smaller. So how big is a batch that you brew? It's 150,000 bottles. 150,000 bottles. And then three of those make one fermenter. Then how long does it stay in the fermenter? So at Lager, we ferment between eight and 10 days. And Lager literally means to store or to age. So we'll age our beer for an additional 30 days out in the cellar. Excellent. So what's the next big challenge that you want to overcome that potentially technology can help you with? Ooh. Shit, I don't know. You got it all wired. I used to joke that the bottling machines used to be the biggest nightmare that I knew of. The bottling labeling machine was always a little bit more difficult than people ever gave a credit. Yeah, so we want to be innovative. There's new technologies that come out each year. And as they come, we'll be interested in acquiring them. So great. Well, thanks, Justin, for stopping by. This is Jeff Rick at the Gordon Beer Spurri in San Jose, California. You're watching The Cube.