Commercial COA Practice: Whatever Panel the Lab Runs

When a working brewery sends sorghum malt to a commercial lab, it gets whatever panel that lab already runs — a barley malt COA or a feed-nutrition analysis. Our own 2019 certificates document both, and both measure real things that are not quite the thing.

Part of the Evaluation Methods survey.

What it is

Commercial certificate-of-analysis practice: the de facto methodology for any producer needing numbers on real lots, on real timelines. Our datasource holds both of its flavors from a single year. The Hartwick College Center for Craft Food and Beverage analysis of Bard's production malt (2019) applied a brewing-lab barley malt panel — DP, alpha-amylase, FAN, extract, color — the numbers that anchor Why Native Malt Enzymes Are Not Enough. The Midwest Labs panels on white (Ivory 7) and red (319) sorghum malt (2019) applied a feed-and-forage nutritional panel — protein, minerals, energy values — because that is the panel an agricultural lab runs on grain samples.

What's right and wrong about it

Right: it exists, it's fast, it's independent, and third-party numbers on production malt are worth more than in-house numbers on anything — that's why we published ours. Wrong: neither panel was designed for the question. The brewing panel imports the barley premise; the feed panel measures cattle nutrition. A brewery evaluating malt through commercial COAs is assembling its quality picture from adjacent instruments — usable, honest, and structurally incomplete: no turbidity, no sensory, no external-enzyme performance.

The verdict

Commercial practice is the strongest argument for a real standard: labs run what's specified, and nothing is specified. Give commercial labs a defined sorghum malt evaluation — the GFB-SME proposal — and this whole page becomes historical.