Lots and lots of studying. That’s what I’ve been up to since Jim Brown taught us fermentation and microbiology a couple of weeks ago. This topic in particular has been the most challenging area for a lot of us in the MBP so far. With a lot of the other topics I have found I have been able to follow the story logically and that has helped me remember things. It’s the same for fermentation, if you can follow what’s happening you can logically work your way through it and remember what the steps are and what is important to brewing. The problem is that the steps are sometimes extremely complicated biological pathways. This is particularly true for understanding yeast-derived flavor compounds. Fusel alcohols, esters, VDK’s, fatty acids, organic acids, ethanol are all produced by different metabolic pathways related to glycolysis from glucose to pyruvate. So I’ve spent a lot of time over the past week and a half going through these pathways to better understand them. I think it is finally paying off, I’m feeling much more confident about this stuff…I think. We’ll see when I get back the exam we wrote on Monday.

We are also spending a lot of time these days on contaminating organisms – wild yeast and bacteria. Beer is a fairly inhospitable environment as it has low pH, high ethanol content and the α-acids from hops also act as a disinfectant. However there are several organisms that can make a brewers life hell and we need to get to know them, where they hide, when they pop up and how to get rid of them (sometimes not possible…tear down the brewery). I find this to be particularly useful as a brewing student. As the course was described to me, it is not only about making good beer (anyone can do that), it is about knowing how to fix problems when they occur, or better yet, how to prevent them.

We had our final (official) brewery tour of the course last week and this time we hit up Lagunitas in Petaluma California. A brewery known for good times and they showed it to us. We were first treated to a couple of beers in their inviting and rustic tasting room that reminds me of my Grandpa’s basement (lots of things on the wall and lots of old furniture). The tour was focused on packaging so we headed over to their keg line and pretty quickly to the bottling line. When we got to the bottling line we stayed there for the rest of the tour, had free reign and got to check out all of their equipment. The staff were really nice and surprisingly tolerant of us running about. They even pulled a couple of bottles off of the line for us to try an “8 second old” Undercover Shutdown (I encourage you to research how that beer got its name). After the tour we sat in the scorching sun (have I mentioned it’s been summer here for at least a month) and tasted a good variety of their beers.

It’s hard to believe we only have two and a half weeks left of the first phase of the course. Next week the Pope of Foam, Charlie Bamforth is finally back from overseas and he will be teaching us about beer quality and of course, foam. I am definitely glad he will be back because he brings a certain excitement and comic relief to the class. After how intense the last couple of weeks have been in terms of material I think we will all appreciate it.

So I suppose I should mention some exciting things I have planned for the second phase of the course. This next phase is a lot less structured that the first phase, where we basically sit in front of instructors and learn. For the second phase, some students take internships and some choose to stick around for review, microbiology labs and guest speakers. I was unsure of what to do initially but I have decided to take the internship route as I need the experience and I am craving some hands on work in a brewery. I have set up two internships that I am extremely excited about. I will initially be at Steamworks in Vancouver (the Burnaby brewery) the last two weeks in April and then I will head to Victoria for two weeks at Phillips Brewing. I am super thankful to the folks at both Steamworks and Phillips for bringing me on and I hope I can contribute with some old fashioned hard work and motivation.

The week before these internships begin I will be attending the Craft Brewers Conference in Portland Oregon. I am also very excited about this opportunity and hope to meet some experienced brewers who can give me some pointers on being a successful brewer. I was hoping more people from our class would join but I think the cost of the conference is holding people back (It’s a good thing I bought my tickets before I was unemployed). I will write a bit more on what I hope to get out of the conference closer to that time, and once I attend I hope to write a good summary of what I learned.

That’s it for me for now. Tomorrow I’ll be learning about lab analysis on beer and then studying for our upcoming engineering test. We have a long weekend coming up since we don’t have sensory this week. I was planning on studying all weekend, but with the weather forecast at 28°C, I think I will join Judith on a hike at Yosemite National Park instead.