Meet the Team

We’re a group brewers and data nerds working together to provide craft beer with innovative tools for a maturing industry. 

  • Brynn has hands in everything from product design to sales and marketing.

    On Brynn’s first day in brewing, she sprayed yeast all over her coworker, which was caught on a security cam that the owner’s retired dad watched live. It’s best to get pride out of the way in the beginning. Over the next 12 years, she went on to build quality control programs for Left Hand Brewing, Island Island Yeast, and many other breweries, which became the foundation for Grist.

  • Nancy builds partnerships with breweries and suppliers that enrich Grist’s ecosystem.

    Nancy also came to Grist from the brewery industry and is who to contact if you’d like to talk partnerships. She’s got 20 years of experience growing scrappy startups and is always pushing us to expand our ideas around what is possible. When she’s not working, you can find her in the woods somewhere, spending quality time with her pups.

  • Mark does quality control on new features and guides breweries through using Grist.

    He’s a brewing scientist with a background in chemical engineering, and worked with Brynn in lab at Left Hand Brewing. Mark bikes horrifying distances (9,000 miles in 2022) and consumes an inhuman amount of written word (100 books so far this year). We thought a newborn baby would slow him down, but not at all. You can check out his homebrew adventures @Wingertbeerworks

  • Radu designs and builds the software that you’ll use every day.

    Radu taught himself to code before getting a degree in computer science and music theory. He's passionate about product development and AI. Outside of work, Radu and his partner like to find unique or unusual experiences in the places they travel, and at home they help neuter and house stray cats. At work, he’s usually the one pushing us to think about problems differently.

Our Story

The Dog Days of Data

When I got hired as a lab tech at Left Hand in 2015, it was my dream job. Initially, one of my biggest challenges was what to do when a beer failed for any reason (VDK, IBU, sensory, etc). While the lab is usually data-driven, making process changes tends to be intuition-driven. I wanted to do deeper analysis to change that, but our production data was on paper logs and took days to get into a usable format. Even when I got it into a table, looking at more than a few variables simultaneously wasn't realistic. We invested hundreds of hours into Excel sheets (just ask Mark) to consolidate data, which was great for the organization but didn’t solve aggregation/analysis issues. They also had serious limitations and required constant maintenance.

The beginning of Grist

I looked for a solution to the data problem, and didn’t find any software that would help. We used Obeer at the time, which is built on an inventory/accounting platform, like most brewery software. Retrofitting a business tool for brewing doesn’t really work for in-the-weeds production data. I sketched these truly terrible wireframes back when I knew nothing about software, product design, or business. Somehow, a friend convinced a couple of engineers (also homebrewers) to take a chance on the project. Like most breweries, I jumped off the deep end because it was something I believed in.

Fast forward to Now

You can see what those two wireframes eventually turned into on the right. The first person I brought on was our engineer, Radu, who is always pushing us to think outside the box. Next came Mark, who reminds us to keep putting usability and front-end users first. Then came Nancy, who is always brainstorming how to be better tomorrow than we were yesterday. Grist is a business, but it’s also a passion project, and it never stops feeling cool to see breweries find value in what we’ve built. Don’t think we’re done innovating, because the foundation is laid for AI-based root cause analysis, better predictive scheduling, and modern recipe development.

Want to learn more?