EPISODE S.4, E.21

Toby (00:09):
Welcome to another episode of the BrewDeck podcast. Hi, Heather.

Heather (00:13):
Hi, Toby. How’s it going?

Toby (00:14):
Good, good. Quick announcement before we get rolling. GABF, Great American Beer Festival is later this week. So if you’re out and about in Denver, make sure you go by and check out our annual industry party at Little Machine Beer on Friday, September 22nd, and it’s from 11:00 to 3:00. It’s always a great time out there, so if you’re out and about, head out there, it’s also co-hosted with our friends over at Five Star Chemicals. It is free you to get in, but bring along your GABF badge doing some collab beers. It’ll be a good time.

Heather (00:48):
Yeah, that’ll definitely be a good time. All right, so we have a very jam packed, actually two part episode series on safety that we’re going to dive into. So we’re going to do part one today. We’re going to be joined by Matt Stinchfield, author, safety consultant and safety subcommittee member for the Brewers Association. And then as a part of the United Malt family of brands, we’re really excited to sit down with Tiago Darocha, our Chief Operating Officer.

Toby (01:15):
Awesome. Speaking of Matt, we are going to give away one of the books that he recently released. It’s called Brewery Safety: Principles, Processes, and People. Once you hear him talk about it on the episode here, you’re not going to want to miss this opportunity to get ahold of one of these books. So really, I got to do to enter is to rate and/or review the BrewDeck podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcast. Then just submit a screenshot of your rating via the link that we put in the episode notes. And just note, we will close this giveaway in two weeks, so on October 3rd when we release our upcoming cleaning episode. So if you want that book, it’s good stuff, be sure to enter so we can send you one.

Heather (02:01):
That’ll be awesome. Before we dive in, I just want to let people know we do go over some content that may be alarming to some listeners in this. We do talk about safety hazards in the brewery, no gory details, but if talking about injuries might make some people feel uncomfortable. So we just want to give you a heads-up that you might want to skip over some of those parts.

Toby (02:19):
Cool. Let’s do it.

Heather (02:22):
And we are now joined by Matt Stinchfield, author, safety consultant, formerly being on the BA Safety Committee. Man of all things safety. Welcome, Matt.

Matt (02:34):
Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Heather (02:37):
Before we dive into all the questions that we have for you because I know we have a lot, can you just introduce yourself, tell us a bit more about yourself?

Matt (02:44):
Sure. Happy to. Matt Stinchfield, career safety guy. I started out doing environmental safety work, cleaning up polluted sites, Superfund sites, that sort of stuff where there’s an incredible emphasis on worker safety around some pretty peculiar hazards. And then 25 or so years ago, I sort of just took a little bit of a left turn and started aiming that more at beverage production safety and got involved in brewing, became a brewer, owned a brewery, and was named the original chairperson of the Brewers Association Safety Subcommittee, which just celebrated 10 years running. And I’m still on that committee now. And I was a safety ambassador for the Brewers Association during the time that they had that position from 2015 to 2022.

Toby (03:35):
You got quite the rap sheet, and maybe that’s the wrong verbiage here, but yeah, looking at your experiences and not just in our industry, and a chemist, is that right?

Matt (03:45):
That’s right.

Toby (03:46):
An editor at brewing news, brewmaster, as you mentioned, brewery owner and a little bit in the insurance realm as well. So I’m sure there’s a certain aspect of safety in all of those. So yeah, no, happy to have you on.

Matt (04:01):
There is, well, years ago, I met a wedding photographer and he had a beat up camera and a little wooden crate that he carried around to stand on so he could get up higher for his pictures. And I looked at him and I’m like, “Really, you’re doing that with just this?” And he said, “Well, I learned to take pictures a long time ago. It’s really about the people stuff.” So I think that’s what spending 40 years in safety has done for me is it’s gotten me past some of the trappings that people get stuck on, and really, it boils down to being about people more than anything else.

Toby (04:36):
Absolutely. So I heard on a video that the BA did, I believe back in ’19 is a pretty cool little video with you on safety. But one of your quotes amongst many great ones was safety is freedom from harm, safety is love, love for yourself and love for your brewery family. Is that how you would define safety or is it encompasses a lot of different things?

Matt (05:04):
No, my go-to definition for safety actually comes from the US Department of Defense and it is safety is freedom from harm, which was developed by an institution that sends people into harm’s way as a matter of daily business. So I always thought that was a little ironic, but beside that, it’s very clear cut and you can elaborate on it by saying what kinds of harm. You can say harm is anything that makes you sick, injures you, damages your property, your product, your equipment or the environment. So being in that state, it’s not blissful necessarily, but there’s an idealized state where there’s no harm that can affect you badly and that is a safe place. So safety is freedom from harm. It’s a very easy way to think about it. And as far as safety being love, yes, safety is really about taking care of your physical wellbeing. And then the other parts that we often forget are the physical wellbeing of those we work with and we interact with. So keeping an eye out for other people, I think that’s an area where we can improve.

Toby (06:16):
So what are some of the most common safety concerns for breweries? And with Cheyenne and Heather, we’ve been into a lot of different ones and safety is number one at our organization as well. So there’s a lot of things that we can take a look at and immediately recognized as a potential hazard. But what are some of the most common safety concerns that you feel are current in breweries?

Matt (06:44):
You bet. Well, first of all, a brewery is a manufacturing facility. Even a very small simple one with only a handful of employees is still a manufacturer. And with manufacturing, you have anything that has to do with material handling. So you have the hazards of lifting, moving materials, whether it’s by forklift or manually. You have slippery surfaces, you have hoses and power cords on the floors, so there’s an opportunity for tripping there. There’s work at heights, so you can fall. And then you have all of the basic energy related things, which include electricity, pressure, vacuum, atmospheric hazards. So if you look at OSHA’s top 10 lists every year, they come out with the 10 most citations in general industry. And you’ll find that nine or 10 out of those 10 are commonplace things. You’d look at any brewery and go, yep, yep. Chemical safety, we didn’t have the SDSs, we didn’t have protective equipment, we didn’t have machine guarding, we didn’t have confined space procedures, those sort of things.

(07:57)
But I would also say that while they’re not common in other industries, breweries as a whole have some very peculiar hazards that don’t have particular regulatory standards attached to them. One of those is the potential for kettle boil overs, which can be catastrophic and can cause fatal injuries. And also during dry hopping, there’s a lot of work that’s being done with improper use of ladders. And you’re also dealing with pressure at height with a handful of stuff. And oftentimes overfilled fermenters because of the profit motive of running larger brew lengths through your system with each batch. So breweries have all the common stuff that you think about in any manufacturing facility, but they also have some pretty oddball ones that as an industry we pay attention to. And both the MBAA and the Brewers Association have put out a lot of guidance on those peculiar hazards.

Cheyenne (09:04):
It’s interesting that you bring up dry hopping as well because like you said, with the added safety concerns of working at heights, you’re handling the hops, you’re on a ladder, you also have the safety concern of the nucleation that can happen when you dump the hops in and you have that geyser explosion of beer that’s coming out of the top of the tank. Hopefully that does not happen, but I’ve definitely seen it happen working in the brewery. And so that’s an added safety concern as well.

Matt (09:27):
Yeah, it really is. And of course there’s CO2 gas gushing out of the port when that happens. It’s also a force that’s enough to disrupt somebody’s balance if they’re not well-placed on ladder or however they got up there. And the other thing is that if there’s more dissolved CO2 in the beer than the brewer expects at the time that they’re doing dry hopping, yeah, you get that nucleation and it’s an explosive volcano of beer and hops. And so in that, a lot of safety things, the real reason you can do it if you want to argue against safety for some, I don’t know what moral or political reason is, it’s also a waste of beer. It’s an expensive mistake to make in a brewery and it requires a lot of cleanup and you lost a lot of product when it happened if you didn’t destroy the batch.

(10:23)
So that’s one of the things if we talk about safety culture today that I’ll be sure to bring home is that a good, safe working environment is a profitable working environment. It’s not just because of this mythical safety thing that we try to be safe. It’s that safety is a value, it’s a business value that makes businesses more profitable, it makes them produce more efficiently, it increases quality in many cases, and it’s significant for employee retention. So why not be safe if all of those good side effects can be a result of a safe working environment?

Heather (11:10):
Most of our listeners are brewers, brewery owners. Even we’ve seen a lot of people that are planning on opening breweries. Where would you say that they should start to incorporate proper safety procedures into their brewery?

Matt (11:24):
Well, I’d like to invoke the name of Rumi, a 13th century poet who said, in no uncertain terms, “The fish rots from the head.” And I am applying that proverb to mean if management doesn’t set a good example for safety, you’re going to lose the whole thing. You’re going to lose the whole organism. So the first place to start in any safety initiative is sincere devotion to a safe workplace by the ownership. I run into people who are very independently minded and they think they know better than that or they have some predilection against safety because it feels like some external control force over their business, I have advice for them about that. But the real thing is that it begins at the beginning. It shouldn’t be something you put off till later. I’ve seen breweries that start a business and they’re like, first thing we got to do is start making product.

(12:34)
Well, that’s great, but you need an administrative system, even if it’s a simple one, you need a bookkeeping system, even if it’s a simple one, and you need a safety program, even if it’s a simple one. So for those who are starting out or small businesses that don’t really have anything formalized in the way of safety, the first thing I would say is you need management direction on it. You need commitment. Secondly, that usually is memorialized in some sort of a safety policy statement, a safety mission statement, something like that. And that’s just something that that group itself writes up and owns. It can be a couple of sentences that just says, we want you to get home and at least a good a condition as you arrived here at work, you’re valuable to us and we want you to have good health and wellbeing while you’re here.

(13:28)
I’m not trying to put words in anybody’s mouth, but that something very simple like that. The second thing is that an employee manual, and again, in the beginning of a company, the employee manual is going to be rudimentary and it’s going to evolve with time. And nothing in safety is static. It’s always evolving and hopefully it’s always getting better. So in that employee manual, there are some pages about here’s what we expect in the way that you conduct yourself and here’s how we’re going to improve that. If there’s a problem, you can put discipline stuff in there if you feel like that’s where you want to go. But the important thing is that everywhere a new employee looks, they’re seeing something about safety. There’s the mission statement on the lunchroom wall. There’s the thing in the employee manual. And then the third part is during employee orientation, don’t skip over safety.

(14:24)
Even if it’s what we in the safety trade would call awareness level training. And that is simply, okay, I understand the situation. I’m in the brewery. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s pressure, there’s temperature, there’s noise. Here’s how I pass through that space and do it safely. If you’re front of house or you’re admin and you’re not actually even in production, you still need to have a little awareness about what’s going on. And then for those people who are engaged in specific tasks, that’s where you’re going to start building your safety program from the ground up through a process called hazard assessment. You look at a task, say, we’re just talking about dry hopping. You look at a task of dry hopping, I have to depressurize the tank, I have to get to an elevated work position. I have to administer the new hops, and I have to do all of that without causing a hot volcano or falling off the ladder and hurting myself or opening up a pressurized system too quickly and causing a flying object.

(15:29)
And once you’ve conducted that hazard assessment of this is how I’m going to do the job safely, you memorialize that in something like a standard operating procedure. And that’s where people who have aligned level interaction with a workplace hazard go to find out exactly how to do that task correctly. And you can see why safety plays into quality, because all of a sudden, you’ve got this document, which is saying, and it could just be an outline, it could be a single page thing, it could even be on an intranet on a worker’s mobile device, but whatever it is, they know that they can look at that. And this is the way that we do it here at this particular brewery, and we do it this way because it’s safe and we get out of that consistency. Consistency leads to quality and also cost efficiencies in the way that we run our job. So safety pays dividends in ways that aren’t just related to reducing injuries.

Toby (16:34):
Yeah. Matt, you mentioned very good insight on safety protocols, work environments, et cetera. So for those listeners out there that may be in a small brewery that maybe doesn’t have that hands-on management that has the employee manuals or really focuses and encompasses safety in their brewery, what would you say for those that wanted to raise a hand and say, “Hey, we need to incorporate some of this into our brewery and it’s important to me,” how would you give some advice on for those individuals that would like to speak to management or speak to some people above them about integrating the importance of safety in their day-to-day?

Matt (17:22):
Right. Well, I think you almost gave it away to yourself in your question, Toby, because you said, what’s important to me? Any individual in a work environment needs to have enough voice, or as my friend, Dr. Jay would say, “You have to have a seat at the table and then you have to have a voice once you’re at that table.” So that circles back to culture, which I hope we’ll talk about soon, but the notion that I can speak up because I’m concerned about my wellbeing is vital. I’m the best asset to the employer when I’m healthy and happy and productive. And so any reasonable employer should be saying, okay, how do I keep my folks in that state where they’re not only happy and healthy and productive, but they’re doing things safely. And so that’s reducing our operational costs, and you have to speak up.

(18:21)
And if you speak up, more often than not in my experience, you will get somebody’s attention and you will start to have a groundswell of that positive attitude, hey, how can we make this better? Not working here is horrible because nobody cares. You can turn that around. It does take a long time to turn it around. It takes a personal investment from everybody involved to change safety culture. And I will also say that with umpteen thousand breweries across North America right now, if you’re working for someplace that makes you fear every day that you go into work because of safety fears, there are safer breweries out there for you to work at.

Toby (19:12):
Absolutely.

Matt (19:13):
So don’t feel like you’re a slave to a particular business operation if that business operation is causing you anxiety and anxiety and fatigue and overworking and burnout and all those things, those are tremendous contributors to incidents in the workplace where people are injured.

Toby (19:31):
Yeah, a 100%. I think it’s another topic in and of itself is psychological safety, right?

Matt (19:38):
Absolutely.

Toby (19:39):
Yeah, we could speak about that if you’ve got some opinions on that as well.

Matt (19:44):
I do. It was funny because when I pitched the outline for the book about three years ago, I did what probably every safety guy was going to do, which is physical safety, chemical safety, biological safety, systemic safety, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there were a few chapters that evolved during the writing of the book where it’s like, wait, I’m not even talking about people’s mental wellbeing here. And that’s huge. I know that from accident investigation how often the state of mind of an individual contributed to a bad situation. And so I ended up writing a whole chapter on psychosocial hazards, which I’m really pleased with, but it was the hardest chapter for me to write because I had to go to resources that I was just not used to working with outside of safety. I read more psychological journal articles than I care to tell you about.

(20:45)
But what I came up with was there are three different things that are going on in the minds of workers in a workplace setting. Any individual can bring with them their own natural wiring, and we would call that neurodiversity. So some people are operating on multiple thought channels at the same time, and whereas other people might stick to a single task or a single idea, there’s no right or wrong to that. And if you understand who you’re working with and you understand yourself, you can find yourself in a very productive position. There’s a large percentage of individuals that have some known neurodiverse condition that you wouldn’t know simply by speaking with them or looking at them. So it’s like everybody brings their own bag of tricks to the workplace. That’s number one. The second one is how do different individuals interact with one another? And this is where you see a lot of power dynamic in the workforce where, for example, prejudice would be an example of some people having power over others because of applying a prejudicial belief system.

(22:17)
Men are the brewers or some silliness like that. And I once went to a website of a brewery, and I always like to look at who we are, and there were 30 men, the whole company, they had 30 different biographies, 30 men, all about 20s to 30s. I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup. They look so much like each other. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I would never want to work in a brewery that lacked so much diversity,” because diversity is a strength. The third kind of psychosocial dynamic that you get is what comes in the door. You can have customers, we’re dealing in alcohol, so if people are overserved or they show up with another situation, which alcohol has made worse, we need to be trained to recognize that and deal with it in a sensitive, but also direct and timely fashion. So yeah, I did cover a lot of ground in the psychosocial chapter. And then the other chapter that was really goes outside of the nuts and bolts of safety is safety culture.

Toby (23:35):
Well, and I’m glad you mentioned this book you speak of because for listeners out there, we’re going to give away a handful of these things, right?

Matt (23:44):
Yeah, that’s great.

Toby (23:45):
Yeah, I haven’t had a chance to take a look at it, but I’ve heard great things about it and I’m hoping that we get some interaction and we can hand some of these away to some listeners. So good stuff. So yeah, you mentioned culture several times, and obviously it’s a lot we can dig into, but tell us how incorporating a culture of safety into day to day can increase the bottom line. Because right now in the industry, not just the industry, but where we are as far as inflation, et cetera, finances are tight in a lot of cases, and the bottom line is extremely important, and certainly no amount of money should and can trump safety aspect of it. But let’s dive into a little bit of the culture aspect.

Matt (24:35):
Sure. Culture’s not as tricky as it sounds. I quote somebody in my book as saying it’s notoriously nebulous. It’s not really nebulous. Culture is the lens or the basket. Pick any sort of holding or filtering device that you want to. Culture isn’t something you can hold in your hand, but you can think of it as a collection of ideas. And what it is it’s the way that a group represents itself in its beliefs and its attitudes and its knowledge and the underpinnings of all cultures. So not just safety culture, but your overall company culture and even cultures of civilizations. But let’s just stick to safety culture here. All of those beliefs and behaviors and attitudes and knowledge come from really two channels. One of those is experience. So if I’ve fallen off a ladder because I did something that I now realize was a bad move, the next time I climb a ladder, I’ve got that experience.

(25:41)
Well, presuming I can climb a ladder again, the next time I climb that ladder, I have the experience of having fallen off the ladder and I’m now wiser for it. Most people have learned something from that experience, or I might have seen you Toby fall off a ladder and go, yeah, I’m not going to do that. That’s just vicarious experience. But I didn’t live it, but I know it happened. And so those are the things that make me develop my beliefs about ladders. On the other hand, there’s socialization, and that is how we interact with other human beings and what we learn from them. So if we’re a roofing contractor and I go, “Just get up there and carry those bags of shingles up there,” and you go, “Wait, I don’t have my harness on,” and I go, “Oh, come on, don’t be a wuss.”

(26:40)
That is a kind of socialization I’m inducing you to take on a new belief system or a new behavior based on the group attitude here. And you’re looking around at your coworkers and go, “Well, I don’t want to be a wuss, so I just better go do this.” And you do it in an unsafe manner. So socialization and experience are what create the way that we express ourselves. That’s how culture shows up. But how can we influence culture is the real question. And the answer to that is we do it in ways that influence the experience that people have and the social environment in which they learn it or have those experiences, the socialization. So we have to get back to the root of culture, which is experience and socialization. And when we have done scientific assessments of finding out what things really affect can permanently change the cultural expression of a group, we came up with five drivers and only one of them has to do with safety.

(27:46)
And this is a safety study, okay? So let’s call that one thing that have… One of the five things that influences safe workplace behavior is called safety competence. And that would be if we’re sticking with the ladder example, I know how to use a ladder safely. I know that this is the ladder that I can use for that job, but that ladder is not an appropriate ladder for this job. That’s competence and it’s important. But people think that safety in your workplace is all about safety competence, and we have numbers that show that it’s actually not even related. There are many other things, and the four big ones, I already mentioned one, management support and management directive, bosses are still bosses, a safe company, the managers are still managers that nothing changes except in the way that they express their social energy of safety. Hey, the boss is here, let’s do like he does or she does, and the boss walks into the packaging hall and puts on a pair of safety glasses and puts in earplugs.

(28:56)
And that little behavior that they model coming from management sets the tone for the safety of the business. The second thing, which is true in any conversation about business, which is effective communication. Toby, you were mentioning small breweries not having any programs or having anything written down. It is true that a small brewery will still have a, I call it the oral tradition. They have a way of talking about things to each other, and they might even talk about safety, but it’s very irregular, it’s haphazard, and it’s not a good way to create experience, consistent experience and consistent socialization. So improving communication all around. I think the playwright, George Bernard Shaw said, “The problem with communication is people think it happened when it didn’t.” So I could be criticized as an over communicator. I’ll wear that badge with honor, I’ll wear that badge with honor.

(30:00)
The third thing is what we call accountability or measurability. You can’t improve something if you can’t measure it as the saying goes. And so accountability could be we expect you to follow our safety guidances that are written into our SOPs, and we expect you to take training and we expect you to act in accordance with that training. So no cowboying on the forklift or whatever. And if you do, then these are the consequences. That’s one kind of accountability. The other kind of accountability, which there’s a chapter in my book on, is about key performance indicators, which are tools to measure the effectiveness and the improvements in your safety program. And I believe that my book is one of the first places where somebody’s made lists of bunches of KPIs that can be used for breweries.

(30:56)
And some of them are numerical, let’s reduce injuries by 50%. That’s one. But the best ones are what we call forward-looking. They changed the course of the future in a positive way. It’s okay to look at injury rates, but those injuries already happened, so too bad, so sad for those folks. What can we do to be more proactive and to plan a safer future? So there are a lot of KPIs in there that will help people do that. And then the fourth thing I would call inclusivity, and that is you have a seat at the table and you have a voice at that table. It’s bigger than inclusivity. That has to do with, let’s make sure that people of all gender expressions and all racial origins and all cultural traditions are respected for their diverse contributions to the workforce. That’s very, very important.

(31:57)
That’s an underlying theme of this kind of inclusivity that I’m talking about. But what I also am talking about in regards to safety is that a person with let’s say a lesser skilled job, say they’re schlepping packaging materials in a packaging hall, they haven’t learned anything about the science of brewing yet. They’re paid a lower wage rate than the brewers and then the administrators. To be inclusive is to have that person’s voice have equal weight in the safety culture as anybody else’s. And that usually pays off really quickly because that person goes, “Hey, why don’t we do it this way?” Because they’re the one feeling the physical pain of the repetitive motion of lifting and turning with these cartons, for example. And they may have the best idea of how to resolve that problem. So having an open door ish policy, if you know what I’m saying, that people can bring up ideas and people are sought after for their ideas. Hey, you over there, we don’t hear much from your corner.

(33:13)
What’s going on over there? And what can we do to help support you in workplace efficiencies and in reducing the chance of injury? And everybody’s a genius when it comes to coming up with improvements in safety, and it’s a shame to not include them in it. And then the fifth one I mentioned is competence. Just do you know how to do safety stuff? But if you think about these things I’ve just listed, they all play right back into running an effective organization, being profitable, having reduced losses from unexplained, unplanned events and workforce happiness and retention.

(33:58)
So a lot of times safety just looks at, if you’re trying to cost out the value of safety, you just go, well, what was the cost of the broken leg that we avoided then? Then that’s how much we saved. No, not really. If you’re avoiding broken legs on a regular basis, you’re saving in a lot of other ways or you’re probably making better quality beer and you’re probably having longer employee stays with your company and less psychosocial turmoil that’s coming from people who are anxious or stressed or fear for their position or feel unheard or feel put down by their coworkers or any of that other stuff that comes with the psychological aspects.

Cheyenne (34:42):
That’s all so great, Matt. It’s really cool to hear it laid out that way. Because when you think about a team, you do want to think about culture, but hearing about all of the different aspects of a culture of safety is so important. And if I can share a little tidbit from my experience, I worked in a brewery on the production team, and like you said about inclusivity for safety for us, we wanted to include not just all of our production staff, but our taproom staff as well. And we shared a space. The taproom was right next to the brewery. They did have to move through the brewery to get to the walk-in, so we would always include them in our safety trainings. And a big part of what they really enjoyed about it was we gave them almost a sense of responsibility.

(35:22)
And so in my case, the eyewash station was right next to where the taproom was. And so part of what we said was like, “Hey, you have a responsibility to move safely through the brewery, but you also have a responsibility to assist in the event that anything should happen.” And so we gave them the responsibility of like, hey, if you see a brewer or anyone on the production team who is needing to use the eyewash station, we gave them the task of you have to rinse your eyes for 15 minutes and it feels like a lifetime when you’re doing it. And so we gave them the task of, hey, if this happens, not only are you checking on this person, but we want you to time that for them so that we know that they’re getting their eyes rinsed for the proper amount of time. And I heard a lot of feedback from the taproom staff that having that sense of responsibility really made them feel included in what was going on at the brewery as a whole, and it was a great way to involve them in the culture of safety.

Matt (36:15):
I love that, Cheyenne, your story makes me think of a couple of things. One is having an eyewash close to front of house is a good idea anyways, because of the corrosive chemicals that are used in draft line cleaning. And at least in the US, OSHA says that you have to have close by. You have to have eyewash facilities if you’re working with corrosive chemicals. And normally, that just means the dish sink if there’s no eyewash handy. And the other thing is a reminder to people that if you get something in your eyes like that, you get a chemical splash, you can’t see your way to the eyewash. And so having that awareness of your coworkers like, hey, let’s get you over here and help you out and make sure that you’re here for long enough and we’ll call 911 for you if that’s necessary.

Cheyenne (37:07):
Definitely, yeah.

Matt (37:08):
Yeah, great.

Cheyenne (37:09):
The other part that we really loved about it was a great introduction into production for the taproom team because a big part of what we did was we wanted the taproom team to have an underlying understanding of what the production staff did, how the brewing process worked, raw materials, all those things. So not only did we get to teach them about the brewing process while teaching them about safety, so it was like two sides to the same coin in getting to train the taproom staff.

Matt (37:36):
Yeah, and what you’ve done, and when you do that is you’re increasing the overall safety competence of the workforce because of that cross-training and making them aware of hazards that are in areas that aren’t their primary focus of concern. One of the things I did in the book is there’s a large chart in the appendix, a large table, and you can look at any common job description in a brewery and then follow it across the page and where there’s an X in the box, that’s a subject that’s probably a safety subject that’s probably important for that type of worker. So we have barkeep, and then you go across and corrosive chemicals would have a check mark in that box because those are expected to be involved in barkeeping operations or a barkeeper might expect to encounter those in their day-to-day. And so if one of the questions that you have in your evolving safety program is who should get trained for what?

(38:43)
This table is designed to help you answer that question. And also, the very first columns in there are who should get orientation training, new hire training on these subjects? And it’s not based in any regulation, it’s just based in my experience of what is valuable for people who are doing certain things in a brewing operation. But that was the idea behind creating that table was so that an employer or an HR department could go, okay, you’re on hot side work production, or you’re in the cellar, or you’re in packaging, you’re in front of house, these are the things that we want you to focus on safety wise and give you a little bit of a roadmap that way.

Toby (39:27):
Good stuff, man. So a lot of this, we’re texting back and forth the team here about what wonderful information you have here and what a great guest. Let’s talk about this book. You mentioned it several times, as consumers, other people listening, if they want to get their hands on it, where can they go outside of us giving away a few copies?

Matt (39:51):
Yeah, sure. Well, get the free copy, if you can be a winner, that’s great. But if not, Brewers Publications, which is the publishing arm of the Brewers Association, is the publisher of the book. You can buy it at brewerspublications.com website. It’s also available at major online book retailers. I was tickled when it first went up and I did a Google search and it came up on the German Amazon site. It’s not in German yet.

Toby (40:21):
You have succeeded, sir.

Matt (40:24):
But if a German brewer can buy what we think is the only book in the world on brewery safety, that would be awesome.

Toby (40:31):
Yeah, of course, it would. Well, really good, Matt. Hey, we appreciate your time today. This is one of those conversations that we could carry on for several hours and we probably will take another stab at having you back sometime in the future, but really good stuff. And for those that aren’t involved in the Brewers Association or don’t know Matt, he’s made himself very available to our team, which is very great, and we’re extremely thankful for that. But he’s a wealth of knowledge. I’m sure he would be open to helping or listening or doing what he can to help integrate some safety as well. So Matt, thanks again for jumping on with us. This has been fantastic and thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate your time on behalf-

Matt (41:19):
It’s been a great chat.

Toby (41:19):
… of the BrewDeck. Yep, absolutely. All right, make good one, Matt.

Matt (41:22):
Cheers.

Toby (41:22):
Thank you.

Matt (41:23):
You too.

Cheyenne (41:23):
Thank you.

Matt (41:23):
Bye now.

Toby (41:25):
Heather, Adam, I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited to have this individual join us on the podcast today. When we were prepping a while back and talking about having an episode specifically around safety, there was several people in the meeting there on our BrewDeck team that immediately thought of Tiago. He’s been with us for, God, it’s already been a couple of years. But Tiago Darocha is our chief operating officer with United Malt Group. And the reason the name came up is in the last couple of years we’ve seen, we’ve always focused on safety, but he’s really brought on a solid focus on the importance of safety and culture of safety in our organization. And we thought it would be awesome to have him on and talk to us a little bit about his background.

(42:18)
He’s got a long list of things he’s done in the past leading up to his position now, both on the brewing side, did a little bit of engineering on the supply chain side and heavily involved in brewing and different applications. And obviously safety has been a number one concern and point of reference for him too. So the thing I find really cool since Tiago has been on is leading all of our communication and meetings internally with safety. That’s the first and foremost thing that is discussed before we go into anything meeting wise. And I found that very refreshing and obviously the things that trickle down to what I do with my team as well. So without talking too much further, I’ll just introduce Tiago, and Tiago, thanks for joining us.

Tiago (43:14):
My pleasure. It’s really a great pleasure to be with you guys and specifically the topic. I think it’s an incredibly important topic, and I think having the ability to talk about it. And if out of this, we can influence or if we can impact in a positive way, the life of at least one person that’s hearing on the way they go about managing their safety and working through safety with the teams, I think it’d be an incredible outcome. And I think it should make us very happy and proud for the work that you guys are doing with your podcast here. So thanks again for the invitation.

Toby (43:55):
No problem. And if we were all in the same vicinity, we’d all know where the muster point is, right?

Tiago (44:01):
Indeed. Indeed.

Toby (44:02):
Yes, we do. Yeah, very good. Well, yeah. So for the listeners, tell us a little bit about your background specifically in the industry. Like I mentioned earlier, you’ve done quite a few things leading up to your current position. So tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’ve done in the past.

Tiago (44:21):
Yeah, so I’ll go back a little bit to what I studied because I think it’s important. It connects. So I studied mechanical engineering as part of my undergraduate study, and then on my freshman year, I had a job basically as a design… I was working with a design company to design machines, and I was behind a desk the whole summer and I absolutely hated it. And then the next, well, let’s put it that way, I learned a lot. It was a good experience, but it helped me understand what I didn’t want to do, which was be behind the desk all day long. So I went back for my sophomore year, and then in my sophomore year after concluding the sophomore year in the summer, I got an internship with Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Missouri. I was studying about an hour and a half away from there.

(45:18)
And that role was a role supervising the workforce, supervising brewers, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I fell in love with the role, even though I was a sophomore in college, I didn’t really know anything. I didn’t know engineering at that point because it was early enough in my career, and I didn’t know anything about brewery. I really didn’t know anything about how to manage a part of a brewing department, but that’s the role that I was put in. And I was in charge of people, and I fell in love with the role because it was a combination of using engineering to solve problems because they have problems that happen throughout the shift.

(45:57)
And by the way, I was running shifts. So I had a bunch of brewers and they had tasks they had to accomplish to make beer, make Budweiser, and a lot of beers that Anheuser-Busch makes. And so I used the skills to solve problems, but at the same time, you’re doing it with people. And I absolutely loved it. I loved the role, I loved the type of work. I was out and about. I was working with people and we’re making beer, and even though I couldn’t drink back then when I started, I could just look at it. I couldn’t drink.

Toby (46:31):
That’s a struggle. That’s a real struggle having you just look at it.

Tiago (46:35):
It was. Indeed. So as I started that journey, that eventually became 21 years with Anheuser-Busch, safety was always number one. Safety was always number one. And that was what became ingrained in my mind because that was the culture, because if you look back, the history of the company in all industrial environments, people have been working to get injuries to zero. Because it impacts, impacts people, impacts their livelihood, impacts their families, impacts their ability to do what they enjoy doing. So nobody wants to get hurt, nobody wants to see people getting hurt. There’s a real impact. You look at numbers, you look at PowerPoints, but the real world has a real impact. So this was a huge priority at AB. It was a number one priority, and I always felt that way. And nothing that we did there could be compromised by safety. So safety had always to come first.

(47:39)
So that became my ways of working because obviously you’re in a highly industrial environment, lots of machinery, you have heat, you have pressure, you have electricity, you have pneumatics, you have all kinds of dangers and energies that quite frankly can get people killed very quickly. So you have to be able to control it, and you have to be able to manage because you still have to be able to do your job and then make beer, but make it safely. So then everything from there on, I came back and I finished my study. And by the way, I went back for junior year, came back to intern again, then I’m back for senior year, and then I came back full time. And then without going into too much detail, as I’ve said, I’ve spent 21 years of my career at AB.

(48:29)
And every role that I’ve held, safety was the number one focus and the roles that I’ve held, of the 21 years, I spent 13 inside breweries. So literally, managing the breweries. I started as an intern is what I said, and eventually I was plant manager, responsibility for about 500 people and the safety of 500 people. And then I’ve had roles in corporate where I was managing from a director and VP level, where you’re managing more facilities. But ultimately, it’s all the same. You want to make sure that everything that happens and the way that people behave, they’re doing in a safe manner so that everybody’s going home to their families at the end of the day, the same way they came in, maybe a little bit more tired, maybe a little bit more…

(49:19)
They’ve worked hard, but they go back safe, again, that’s the most important thing. So that became my ways of working, and that’s a little bit I’ll share. I definitely have some stories that I’d love to share back in my career, but that’s a little bit of my background. So a lot of time at the plant. So I’d spend a lot of time on the floor, and unfortunately, during that time have had the share of accidents that I’ve had to deal with where people under my responsibility have gotten hurt. And that’s very impactful but you never want to see that.

Toby (49:54):
Yeah, I think, again, it’s worth reiterating that there’s nothing more important than for all of us going home safe to our families. And it is something that you and the rest of our organization make sure that we communicate in every opportunity that we have. And again, it all trickles down to everybody within our organization feeling the same way, and that continues to build the culture. So that’s awesome. So I’m curious, Tiago, if there’s some specific safety challenges that you’ve faced in the past 21 plus years in some form or fashion in any of those roles at AB and how that impacted your thought process one way or the other as far as safety is concerned?

Tiago (50:40):
Yeah, so I’ll share two stories that impacted me. The first one was right when I started at AB, it was in fact during my orientation, and that was before I actually started managing people and managing the process. But that story stuck with me the whole time because the person that gave the presentation, which by the way we started our orientation with safety. So it was the very first topic we discussed. I remember very well. And the person told us a story that marked me until today, and I repeat it when I have the chance and I’m going to do it again here. And hopefully, that has a positive impact because that changed a little bit, even though I was just starting, it changed how I behaved because I always remember that. So this person was just giving us, hey, talking about safety and then hazardous, talking about the dos and don’ts, how to manage, what happens when you have an accident and all that.

(51:32)
So it was all the important things you have to talk about. But the story he told was about was a true story that happened to him where he was several years earlier in a machine shop and he observed an employee using the machine in an unsafe manner, and the person was doing some kind of cutting. I don’t remember the exact details and it’s not really relevant, but the person was doing some kind of cutting. They’re cutting metal. And he noticed when he walked by that the way that the person was utilizing was putting him at risk and he chose not to say anything. He chose to just walk by and move on. And literally, a few seconds after he saw that as they were walking through, they heard a scream. And that person unfortunately lost a finger in that machine.

(52:41)
And that person had their life changed forever, because literally, with everything that comes with, all the pain, all the surgeries and everything that had to happen and the fact that the person lost a finger in the process, but the person that was given us the introduction and talking about safety said, “If I had just said something to that individual, I could have possibly, most likely saved him from getting his finger severed.” And that just stayed with me. It stays with me until today. In fact, I still get a little bit of goose bumps, because just think about it, he saw something that was unsafe. He chose not to say something because he didn’t know the person. He didn’t want to come across as whatever, all these things that always come to our minds and why you wouldn’t want to call somebody out or say something, and he didn’t. And he could have made a big difference in that person’s life and still stays with me today.

(53:40)
So that’s one of the stories, because that, every time I see something that I know when I walk and when I see and it’s unsafe, I never let it go. And I invite you guys to think the same way. Don’t let it go. Say something. You don’t have to. I think the approach makes the whole difference. You don’t have to be condescending, you have to be argumentative. You can just say, “Hey, I’m watching out for your safety. I saw something that concerned me.” There’s ways of doing and you get my point. But if you see something, say something, and that as I spent the rest until today, whenever I’m on about, I see something, I always say, because it can make a big difference, right?

Toby (54:23):
Yeah, no, that’s absolutely. Sorry to cut you off there, Tiago. It’s interesting you mentioned that because we had a chat with Matt Stinchfield, the safety ambassador over the Brewers Association. And one of his bullet points of building that safety culture is you have to have your team feel inclusive. Everybody has to feel like they have a vote and a seat at the table, so to speak. And that means that everybody has a responsibility of really looking not only after themselves, but for others as well. And you have to be able to have that culture where you feel okay enough and feel listened to that you can raise your hand and call things out like that, right? So I’m glad you shared that story.

Tiago (55:08):
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s both ways, because you have to feel comfortable saying something, and you have to be comfortable somebody saying something to you, right?

Toby (55:15):
That’s right.

Tiago (55:17):
And you mentioned in the beginning, which I could not agree more, it’s part of building a true safety culture that has to be in place. And then if I can just tell you the second story that really, really impacted me. As I moved to different portions of my career at AB, eventually I find myself, it was actually at our Newark, New Jersey brewery. I found myself at a relatively young age responsible for a lot of people in one of the departments in brewing. Again, safety has always been super high priority. Start our meeting with safety, follow up on safety. But at that point, I was literally in charge of a department. And then I’ll never forget, I got a call back then. Some of you guys may remember had the Nextels and they had that thing with me 24/7 because there was always something going on, but I got a call…

Toby (56:08):
You didn’t have a pager, Tiago?

Tiago (56:09):
No, I had a Nextel, man.

Toby (56:10):
No?

Tiago (56:10):
It was a Nextel.

Toby (56:11):
Oh, the flip phone. Oh, I got you. Okay. Sorry.

Tiago (56:15):
And I got a call and the person on the other end said, “Tiago, so-and-so just got really injured and we don’t know what’s happening. There’s a lot of blood. And he was bleeding on his face, and we don’t know, we called the ambulance. Ambulance is on its way, but I figured you needed to know.” So I left. I was at the brewery and I left the meeting room and I went to meet him. And when I arrived, he was still in the location. His face was completely… It was full of blood. And so he couldn’t really see what had happened because his face was just full of blood. He’s obviously in a lot of pain. Eventually we got him to the ambulance and I got inside the ambulance with him, and at that point, you’re on the side and he’s there and he’s like, “Hey, please call my family.”

(57:10)
And he’s like, “I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to see,” because it happened in his face, “I don’t know if I can see. I don’t know if I’ve lost an eye. I don’t know what’s going on.” His face is swollen and he’s thinking all this stuff about his family, whether he’s going to be able to see or not. We got to the hospital, they wheel him out, take him inside, and I’m outside waiting for him waiting to see what happens. And at that point, I recall all the phone calls that came to me, “Hey, how’s he doing?” And I was like, “I don’t know, he’s in there. And I just saw he got a lot of blood. We don’t know what’s happened.” And then I remember his family arriving at the emergency room where I was waiting.

(57:51)
I was speaking with them. And at that point, I didn’t really understand that. I knew where he got injured, but I didn’t know exactly what had happened, what had occurred. And then you just see all the real world impact of somebody getting injured severely. Fast-forward, the doctor eventually came out and said, “Hey, he’s okay. He got hurt, but nothing’s broken. He got cut more than hurt. Nothing’s broken, and his eyes are okay.” And what the doctor told me, and I never remembered, the reason why he didn’t get severely hurt is because he was wearing safety glasses. And the reason he was bleeding, it wasn’t from the impact, it was from the safety glasses that as the impact happened against the glasses, the safety glasses pushed against his eye and the safety glasses cut his forehead and the cheeks.

(58:54)
So in the heat of the moment, there’s blood everywhere and you don’t know what’s going on. It’s swollen. There’s all this commotion, so we don’t know what’s going on. But once they cleaned him up, they realized that that’s what happened. So literally his vision, everything, his vision was saved because he was wearing a safety glass. And that was another really powerful lesson for me that I saw first time. I’m like, the importance of PPE or personal protective equipment, man, that’s it right there. I’ve seen it and if anybody should ever question, I’ve seen it. Because it makes a difference and it happens when you don’t think it’s going to happen. That’s the reason why you always got to have it on. So that was impactful, because obviously at that point, I knew the guys, I’ve been working with them for a while, and they become family. I knew him.

(59:54)
I’m not going to say his name, but I knew him, and he was really good worker and we develop a relationship, and I had a really good relationship with all my team, and it impacts you emotionally. It’s like, man, I’m responsible for this person and this person really got hurt and they’re under my watch, he’s part of my team. So you feel really responsible and then you just feel all the pain that the person’s going through, all the what ifs and am I going to be able to see, and what do I tell my family and do I have to have major surgery, et cetera? So that was a really, really impactful event for me because I saw firsthand the impact of an injury. I was part of it in a way because I was really close to it. And it just reinforced to me that having the right protective equipment makes a big difference.

(01:00:46)
And you should never skip on that because it can be the difference between being blind for the rest of your life or losing eyesight on one eye for the rest of your life, or really [inaudible 01:01:00] injury. So that’s another, it’s a little bit of… Oh, and let me just tell you what happened. So there’s a new equipment that we installed. It was a pressure vessel. This pressure vessel had a lid. It was a very, very thick lid. It was probably an inch, an inch and a half thick lid that the way that it was designed, I mean, we can talk about more later, but there’s obviously the way you design things, you want to try and design things thinking that something could happen. So you got to try to think about everything. But the way it was designed, it was simply… It was about probably six inch in diameter, six to eight inch in diameter, stainless steel, an inch and a half thick.

(01:01:45)
So you can imagine the weight of that. And it set atop on the manway of a little vessel. And the way that you opened it is you just had some screws that held it together. And there was a problem, as I mentioned, it was a new machine, there was a problem, and he went to try to figure out what’s going on. He couldn’t tell what was happening, so he wanted to look inside. And what he didn’t realize is that it was pressurized. And when he undid the screw, the minute that… No, I don’t remember the pressure, but it was big enough that the minute that the screw is released and the thing could fly, it literally blew off, hit him in the face, and it actually hit the ceiling. So it scraped him in the face, got him, and then it went all the way to the ceiling and it made a dent in the ceiling.

Toby (01:02:40):
Oh, my.

Adam (01:02:41):
Wow.

Toby (01:02:42):
It’s like a piece of shrapnel.

Tiago (01:02:44):
Yes.

Adam (01:02:44):
I didn’t realize this was going to be the action episode.

Tiago (01:02:52):
Unfortunately, I got lots of stories, but fortunately, hopefully, we can use stories to learn and do better.

Adam (01:02:57):
Okay. So let’s take that and jump forward to what you’re doing now and the approach that United Malt Group takes to safety. Especially with the fact that we’ve got plants across the world, we’re everywhere, there’s different safety protocols, different safety laws per country and all that, how is it that you as part of the team dedicate this team to safety and get that across in a way that’s not only safe, but also lawful and all that stuff? There’s an awful lot going on there.

Tiago (01:03:41):
Yeah. And I’m glad Toby mentioned in the beginning, ultimately we have to provide the nurturing environment for the right culture to flourish itself. So it is a combination of several things. We talked about this, we have to build the right culture. And with culture, I always think it’s how people do things when nobody’s looking, especially with respect to safety [inaudible 01:04:12] is one good way to think about it. Because a lot of times, the way that you do something takes a lot longer if you’re doing it the safe way, whereas you can just do something very quickly. And if you do it the safe way, if you’re talking about a lockout, tagout, et cetera, it can take hours to do something that takes 10 minutes. And if you just do it in 10 minutes and take a chance, something may or may not happen.

(01:04:39)
So you have to help build the right culture so that people really have the ability to say, yeah, I’m going to work safely and that’s the right way to do it. You have to provide people the resources, and by resources, I mean both financial resources. When things have to get fixed, we have to make sure that we’re providing the money for things to get fixed. But it also comes around training and procedures and making sure that everybody knows what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. And so we have to provide that ability as a part of the management team. And then ultimately, I really believe that safety is something that you really have to have it in mind at all times. So I think it’s something, that’s why you’re always talking about safety, start meeting with safety. When somebody brings up a safety point, you go follow up on it.

(01:05:45)
Because ultimately, I think people really have that in mind at all times. Then I think it can make a big difference. So I think from my standpoint, it’s really seeing them, again, making sure people feel that they can bring safety issues up, making sure people they know that they should, even if something’s going to take longer or if they shouldn’t do something because it’s not safe at this moment, that they need more tools or a modification or whatever, more equipment down that they have the ability to say, you know what? We shouldn’t do this, or let’s do this a different way, that they have the financial resources, as I just said, to get things fixed. So there’s a lot of things that go with that, but I think ultimately it’s about creating the right culture about people. That’s the way people behave.

(01:06:37)
And one last thing I’ll say about this, I think ultimately when people start taking home what they’ve learned in the workplace when it comes to safety, to me, it’s one sign, I’m sure there’s many, but that’s one sign to me that people really have that ingrained. For me, there’s two things. I remember when the brewers used to tell me they cut their grass, for example, with safety glove was on, or they mow their lawn with ear plugs. Because these are things, or when they’re doing something in their house, they’re cutting something, they’re drilling something, they have something, they have gloves, they have glasses on. I think it’s one item that tells you that they really, really believe in safety and that’s important to them not only in the real world or not only in their work but also at home. And it translates into personal lives [inaudible 01:07:31].

Toby (01:07:31):
It trickles down, that’s for sure. I’ve got a couple kids and make it a point, and I jump on the bicycle always wearing a helmet so I don’t have to ask anymore, [inaudible 01:07:43], I was like, where’s your helmet? Where’s your helmet? But now, it’s ingrained in them and it’s something, I think you’re exactly right, Tiago, when you’re around it at the workplace, it certainly bleeds over into the family life for the positive. So I agree with you there.

Adam (01:07:59):
Yeah, I’ve stopped bringing my safety flip-flops when I’m mowing the lawn because I don’t want my kids [inaudible 01:08:03] about it.

Toby (01:08:02):
Safety flip-flops. You’re steel toed flip-flops?

Adam (01:08:06):
Right.

Toby (01:08:07):
I’d like to see what those look like, Adam.

Heather (01:08:10):
That feels like he’s failed us all right now.

Toby (01:08:12):
Yeah.

Heather (01:08:17):
So we brought up safety culture a lot. We’ve said it a lot here, we’ve said it a lot in our interview with Matt as well. Can you define where a safety culture win, like an actual successful safety culture?

Tiago (01:08:32):
Yeah. In my view, again, is what I said is when people do things the right way, not because somebody is watching them, but because they just want to do it the right way because they want to be safe. And to me, I think that’s when you can say, yeah, we have the right mindset. Earlier when we discussed where people are comfortable calling each other out and say, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t do this, or I observe that that’s not safe.” And the follow-up on that to me is absolutely critical. One of the things that we implemented at the Newark Brewery that I think had the most value that I really think helped our injury rate decrease significantly was we gave our brewers, our whole team the ability to report a safety concern anytime through their workstations and that notification would go to the senior management of the plant.

(01:09:47)
Anybody had any concerns with regards to safety, I as a plant manager, it was when we implemented back then, I happened to be the plant manager, I’ll get a notification and I would make a point of whenever I was going from point A…. And the plant was huge, so you’d walk a lot and had meetings at different parts of the brewery, and I would make a point and so did my team to walk by and talk to the employee and look at the problem and then making sure that it was getting addressed. And by the way, that then went into a database, the database was tracked. Who’s working on it? When is it fixed? And then we would get back to the employee saying, “Hey, this was fixed.” So it was a closed loop circle, that’s cycle, I should say, not circle, it’s a closed loop cycle where the employee reported.

(01:10:30)
And then eventually somebody would come back to him and say, “Hey, you reported that, that’s fixed, or this is what we’re doing about it.” And that became really, really powerful. And I remember one time I was walking back to a meeting and I stopped by a filler where an operator had reported something because I was going from point A to point B, and the filler happened to be, and I remember it’s like, oh, let me just go talk to the operator. So I stopped in, took three minutes, say, “Hey, I just saw you submitted this.” He’s like, “Wow, I’m impressed that you’re stopping by and it’s great.” And he showed it to me. I was like, “yeah, you’re right. Thanks for pointing that out. You may have prevented somebody from getting injured,” and then put a work order. And we got it fixed. And then a few days later, I happened to be walking in the area and I stopped by and I stopped and talked to the operator and he’s like, “Yeah, it’s fixed. Look at that.”

(01:11:13)
But that just has such a powerful presence because ultimately people’s like, yeah, this is important. Safety is not from the mouth out. If people are really taking action, the management team stops by, things get fixed. And to me, back to your question, you asked, what’s a success? It’s a successful environment because everybody has safety in mind. People are actively looking for problems. Problems are getting fixed before people are getting injured. I think it’s self-sustaining. Again, we keep going back to culture because it has such a big influence, but it continues to build the right culture.

Toby (01:11:54):
Well, one of the DCs, and I’ve been to so many of them, I can’t recall which one, but has a big giant sign that says, “Safety has no quitting time.” And it resonates. And I really like that, and I use it a lot, but unfortunately, you’re a busy man, Tiago, and you got important stuff to do.

Tiago (01:12:11):
Safety is number one. So this takes priority.

Toby (01:12:14):
There you go. I like it. I like it. Well, I really appreciate you jumping on and spending some time with us and then learning a little bit more about you. But yeah, again, continue doing what you’re doing and we appreciate what you brought to the table for our organization as far as focus on safety, you along with your team as well, I know Matt Beltran, our EHS manager, so I appreciate what y’all are doing as far as a safety conscious organization and leading by example. So I appreciate you coming on.

Tiago (01:12:44):
My pleasure and I commend you guys for making this a topic. I think it’s a very important topic, and I’m glad that we’re taking a little bit of time to talk about this. So thank you very much. It’s been a great pleasure.

Heather (01:12:56):
Thank you so much to our guests, Matt and Tiago. And to everybody listening, don’t forget to enter our giveaway to get Matt’s book. You can view the full details in the episode description.

Toby (01:13:07):
Yeah, and instead of making everybody wait for two weeks for the next episode, we will be back for part two of our safety episode series featuring the one and only Jeff Erway from La Cumbre Brewing Company in New Mexico. Make sure you subscribe to the BrewDeck podcast so you don’t miss it, and we’ll have everybody join us next time. Bye.

Heather (01:13:27):
See you next week.