Monday Musings (on a saturday afternoon)

As you may well have guessed, there are a lot of great things about taking a course in brewing at a college.  There are classes on sensory evaluation, which can be wonderful or horrible depending on whether or not we are learning about beer taints.  The other day in our ingredients class we got to nibble on and discuss a whole slew of different malts.  Plus, you've noticed we get some pretty awesome field trips.

Specialty Malt; Base Malt; Delicious, Delicious Malt

 
However, by far the best thing about our program is the on-campus brewery.  This sounds like a no brainer; of course getting to brew beer is awesome.  But there is more to it than that.  There is this extra feeling of safety when brewing at school with your peers.  I am not talking about physical well being safety (though I can't stress the importance of that enough).  What I am referring to is that freedom you get from the environment at an educational institute that is somewhat different than the real world.  It's a difficult thing to explain unless you've been to school and then plied your skills afterwards at a real job.  School tries to mimic the workplace but it is sort of artificial in comparison, for us in the brewery, I think that is a great thing. 

Somewhat different than a production brewery!

Most of us have never had the opportunity to brew with real production equipment.  I know that my experience has been limited to components that I built for myself in the garage.  My Coleman cooler mash tun doesn't have steam jacketing, pumps or a million valves;  working on the brewery's equipment is a whole other world.  Mistakes are going to be made, it's inevitable.  When someone is holding a hose and another person turns on a pump, spraying beer on the ceiling (hypothetically speaking of course-though beer does make great hair gel), or somebody leaves a valve open somewhere and we inadvertently spew a few litres of wort onto the floor, no one is going to get in serious trouble.  This is a learning brewery, losses like that are built into the budget and aren't going to seriously affect the business.  Sure, nobody wants to see it happen- I mean that is beer getting wasted for crying out loud- but instead of getting in trouble for that, 13 people get a valuable lesson and the ones responsible merely feel like they have let down their friends.  The consequence is disappointment and shame, nobody is going to get fired. The next time we brew everyone is going to double check that valve, but no one will hesitate to "get in there" for fear of screwing up.

This confidence has bought us a lot of trust from the faculty as well.  We can now sign up to brew our own recipes on the the small 50 litre pilot systems.  There is still supervision in case we get in over our heads but mostly we run the brew day ourselves.  Thanks to the wonderful generosity of the industry we actually have great ingredients to play with so we are free to be creative and experiment without fear of breaking our fragile student budgets.  This allows us to explore ideas we've had but never got around to trying because if it doesn't work out then we have wasted our money.  It is the willingness to explore and try new things that has made craft beer so amazing in recent years.  The freedom that the college environment creates encourages us to take these risks and turn them into learning experiences that we will take with us out in the real world.  A small group of us were brewing an IPA the other day and realized we had a bunch of whole hops that were given to us and needed to be used up.  This motivated us to jerry-rig a filter into a hopback (to run the beer through) right on the spot, and try a new technique that we have only read about before.  It may sound like a simple thing but it was exciting, it was inspiring, and that feeling is infectious.  We felt like MacGyver brewers and that is what makes a career enjoyable no matter how many years you are doing it.  The freedom to be truly creative and the confidence from our successes are what will enable us to continue the great tradition of quality and innovation that the craft beer industry has established.
Until next time,
Cheers!