Episode #003 | Gaia Freytag, Quality Assurance Manager at Birrificio del Ducato - a podcast by Natalya Watson

Today’s guest is Gaia Freytag, Quality Assurance Manager at Birrificio del Ducato in Parma, Italy.

While pursing her Master's in Food Science and Technology, Gaia discovered her passion for beer and sought to learn everything she could through self-study, in addition to her coursework.

After graduating, she had a short stint interning at a brewery in north Italy, then landed her current role at del Ducato.

In addition to her work in the lab, Gaia also serves as a brand ambassador for the small team, traveling to represent the brewery at events and festivals across Europe.

And that’s actually how Gaia and I met. She was over in London to pour at a festival and – as del Ducato is now part of the Duvel family – she reached out and asked if we could get together for a beer and a chat. And I’m so, so glad she did. We chatted for two hours about our shared passion and I knew then I needed to get Gaia on the podcast.

Beer quality is something we all hear mentioned, but very few of us actually know what it entails or may feel intimidated by all the technical terms. Gaia loves what she does and does her best to make quality a topic we can all engage in.

That said though, if there are any topics we discuss that we didn’t go into enough detail on or that you’d like to learn more about, Gaia has very kindly offered to take your questions to help make sense of it all. Head on over to beerwithnat.com to find out how to reach her. (Thanks, Gaia!)

In this episode, you’ll learn all about the day to day role of a quality manager, why Gaia feels her job never truly ends, and what she thinks are the most overlooked aspects of quality – by both breweries and consumers.

You’ll also hear where beer has let Gaia travel to, what she gets up to outside of the beer world, and how beer has helped to bring her out of her shell.

Here she is…

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