Bridget Gauntner, Market Quality Specialist

Bell's Brewery, Inc.

Bridget Gauntner became part of the craft beer industry about 11 years ago. After receiving her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology, she was hired to work as a QA lab tech at Great Lakes Brewing Company. From this, she learned so much about the inner workings of production. She spent her days looking through a microscope, swabbing petri dishes, climbing grain trucks to test raw materials, and her favorite part…running a taste panel. She gained a great appreciation for all of the hard work done by folks in the brewery to turn out great beer.

Often, Bridget was a regular consumer buying draught or package beer and was disappointed that the quality of the beer she experienced could be so drastically different from the same beer she enjoyed at the brewery. It made her curious of the causes of these discrepancies. After working in the lab for a couple of years, she was anxious for some change. She wanted to grow and expand her horizons, but still had love for the craft beer industry and was extremely passionate about quality. She wanted to help ensure that consumers could experience beer the way the brewer intended, no matter the distance from the brewery.

Eventually, this path led Bridget to working at Bell's Brewery. She joined the team almost six years ago as a Field Quality Specialist. While touring the brewery as a new employee, she was blown away by the advanced lab equipment being used, and even more impressed with the caliber of people who worked at Bell's. It instilled a great confidence in her for the brand that she had the honor to represent. Having so much trust in Bell's beer quality makes her job pretty darn easy.

Earlier in her career, Bridget joined the Brewers Association Draught Beer Quality Subcommittee and was named Chair in 2019. The collaboration of so many competing brewers working toward the common good of promoting beer quality was what really drew her to the subcommittee. Meeting both large and small brewers echoing the same best practices was very inspiring.

Darla Goeres, Research Professor

Montana State University

Dr. Darla Goeres has over 25 years of experience researching biofilm bacteria in a range of industrial and engineered systems, including biofilms found in beer draught lines, Danish district heating distribution pipes, anaerobic biofilms in soured oil fields, and biofilms in recreational water systems. She has evaluated a multitude of treatment strategies for killing, removing and/or preventing biofilm formation. In 1996, Dr. Goeres was a visiting researcher at the Danish Technological Institute in Aarhus Denmark, and in 2014 she was a Fulbright scholar at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland.

Dr. Goeres leads the Standardized Biofilm Methods Laboratory (SBML) team at the Center for Biofilm Engineering (CBE), whose mission is the development and validation of quantitative standard methods for growing, treating, sampling, and analyzing biofilm bacteria. A leader in developing biofilm standard methods, Dr. Goeres is a long time member of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) subcommittee E35.15 and facilitated the acceptance of the first approved standard methods for biofilm bacteria. This work continues with the approval of ASTM Method E3321 titled "Standard Test Method for an Intraluminal Catheter Model used to Evaluate Antimicrobial Urinary Catheters for Prevention of Escherichia coli Biofilm Growth." In October 2021, Dr. Goeres was awarded "ASTM Professor of the Year."

In March 2020, Dr. Goeres was appointed Research Professor of Regulatory Science. In her new role, she will develop a regulatory science program at the CBE with a goal of engaging regulatory and industrial decision makers in the development of tools that enable innovation in biofilm science and technology.