Taking The Plunge: A Ratebeerian Goes To Brewing School
To say that this day has been a long time coming might be a bit of an overstatement. I wasn’t one of those kids who started homebrewing at 17 and was winning medals in competitions by the time I headed off to college. As shocking as it might sound, I didn’t even like beer when I went to college. It wasn’t until my junior year when I was studying over in Sweden that I was actually interested in beer on a higher level than realizing that I was starting to enjoy wheat beers and irish stouts instead of just tolerating them. About a year and a half ago I was in my last year of school and doing the University of California Washington DC quarter program when it first clicked in my mind — I could actually turn my new-found obsession with beer into a career. Why the hell not, right? I came to DC to study politics and history, but ended up writing my term research paper on the history of beer and the American brewing industry! Thankfully my program director thought it was a really cool idea and I pulled off quite the Powerpoint presentation for my class.
Ever since then, I’ve been working toward going back to school to study brewing. I knew that I could try to get an entry-level job at a local brewery and work my way up, learning on the job, but I’ve always been the kind of guy who dives in head first (and sometimes hits his head) when I find a new passion. I wanted to know everything there was about brewing and beer. I also love school, so brewing school seemed like an obvious choice. I ended up choosing to enroll in the International Diploma Program at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago, or just Siebel as it’s usually called in the beer world. The two main choices for professional brewing schools in North America are Siebel and the Master Brewers Program at UC Davis in Davis, California. Davis was attractive because of its proximity (I’m from the greater Bay Area) and its reputation, but Siebel ended up winning out due to a more attractive curriculum and a shorter waiting list. Hey, and who doesn’t want to spend a couple months in Chicago, right?
So here I find myself in my first week of class. Intimidating is the word I’m searching for to describe my first day. I have fellow students from AB-InBev, Modelo, Corona, Kirin, and several small breweries including Amsterdam Brewing in Ontario, Canada, and the local Chicago brewpub Moonshine. A process manager from AB-InBev’s malting plant in Brazil sits right in front of me as we start on our first module… malting.
Most likely due to this general level of brewing knowledge in the classroom (our barley and malting instructor is the technical director at Rahr, one of the largest maltsters in North America), my amateur homebrewing brain is actually soaking up quite a bit already. Malting actually makes sense, something I never dreamed of a month ago. To finish out the first week, we are moving on to hops and water. After six more weeks of classroom instruction that will take us through the entire brewing, packaging, plant engineering and quality control process, we all board a plane to Munich, Germany where we get three weeks of practical brewery training at the Doemens Academy before shipping off on a two-week study tour of Europe. After all this I’ll either be a brewing genius, have a beer belly, need a long nap, or all of the above. I’ll keep you posted.
3 Comments to “Taking The Plunge: A Ratebeerian Goes To Brewing School”
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mike Reis, Sam Tierney. Sam Tierney said: Into The Brew is now contributing to @Hop_Press ! Check out my new post on starting brewing school at Siebel: http://bit.ly/aEluGh [...]
I’m very excited to read the rest
[...] first week of class went swimmingly, I must say. I did manage to write a little piece about it for The Hop Press over at Ratebeer in case you were wondering. We spent pretty much the entire week on raw [...]