So much to write about since the last time. Most exciting of all was a pair of brewery tours. Monday after class we hit up Rubicon Brewing, first we went to their production facility in West Sacramento where they have an incredibly large warehouse with a new 30 barrel brewhouse and several very large fermenters, a few bright tanks and a couple small bottling lines. Our tour guide was Chris Keeton, a brewer at Rubicon and a classmate in the MBP. They have plans to expand and they definitely have the room to do it in this facility. We spoke for a while with Scott Cramlet, the brewmaster, about his thoughts on what to take away from the course depending on our goals in the industry. Next we travelled to downtown Sacramento to visit the Rubicon brew pub.  This is where the real fun of the evening took place.  We arrived on a day that Rubicon was releasing a few new brews, and Chris had a good deal of creative input in to them and it was nice to see him pumped about the evening.  The place was packed as I’m told it is every night; the crowd included a large number of regulars who are there very regularly.  We chatted with one guy who told us he once went a year and a half straight spending daily quality time at the pub.  It was cool to see Chris in his element as well, the regulars know him well and like to chat about the beer; you could tell he was loving it.

We ducked in to the back to visit the brewery, one that none other than Dr. Michael Lewis designed and installed back in the 80’s. After seeing the West Sac facility, this was a mini version, especially of the fermenters, which were custom made to fit in the 15’ high ceilings. Chris explained how he knows every single piece of equipment and how to treat it to get it to actually work. With such an old brewhouse there are many little quirks that come along with it.  But it was built to last and still kickin.

On Wednesday we received the treat of the course that everyone had circled in their calendars, Sierra Nevada brewery tour day! It was described by Dr. Lewis as “the most beautiful brewery on the planet” and it didn’t disappoint.  The place was massive and spotless, but was also done up to look great. The copper plating of their 200 barrel kettle and lauter tun, which is purely aesthetic, was done by 14 German copper smiths that Ken Grossman convinced to come out of retirement and fly half way across the world to complete.  We walked on what I can only describe as a sky walk (complete with Star Trek style automatic doors) and looked over the solar panel covered roofs and hydrogen fuel cells. They are somewhere around 75% energy self-sufficient at one of the largest breweries in the U.S. in an industry that is incredibly energy intensive.  I really like that they strive for this even though it wouldn’t normally make sense for a company to do it (I think the return on investment for the solar panels is something like 7 years, and more for the fuel cells).

The bottling line was a thing of beauty. We’ve sat through 6 weeks of packaging lectures, but after seeing this room I finally have an appreciation for how complicated and delicate running an efficient bottling line is, and it is way more interesting when you can actually see it working than when you are reading about it or looking at a power point slide. It was nice to know what parts to look for though. The room was filled with super nerdy people (us) getting excited to see random little parts like the jetter (the little nozzle that creates a tiny bit of foam at the top of the bottle just before capping it to remove the last bit of oxygen). At one point a classmate yelled out “Hey Rod, look! Variable drives!!”. This room was also absolutely spotless, it was quite impressive. The highlight of the tour was walking in to the hop room where they break apart the 200 lb bales of whole cone hops that they use. As you can imagine the aroma was delightful. We did a few hop rubs and walked out with green sticky hands…a thing of beauty.  After the tour we headed to the pub for lunch and lots of beer courtesy of Sierra Nevada. We sat in the sun, shot the shit and sampled some fine beers…what else could we ask for? Best day of school in my life.

We are finished with the first module (barley to wort) and just began the second (wort to beer), while the third module (engineering and packaging) continues throughout Phase 1 of the course, which runs the first 11 weeks of the course and also includes sensory. This second module, which focuses mainly on yeast and fermentation is apparently the most difficult of the three and the exam that people have the most troubles on. I have a good amount of chemistry in my background but not too much biochem, meaning I am going to need to focus, something that may not be easy with constant free beer samples being dropped off (we just got 6 cases dropped off by Deschutes!) and the weather getting summery warm.  Luckily this portion of the course is really interesting to me and I am enjoying spending time on it. I’m not sure I would think that if the end product wasn’t beer, but it is, and that is great, because I love beer.