Do you love beer? Do you have wistful daydreams about wit beers? Do you lust for lagers? Do you palpitate for pumpkin ales? Do you soliloquize over saison? If you are passionate for pilsners, them maybe a job in the brewing industry could be a career choice that could change your life. Besides enjoying quaffing a lambic or dubbel, what are some of the skills that will help you start a career in craft brewing?
Be a hard worker
Brewing is not a job for the timid. Brewing has moments of incredibly hard labor There are bags of grain to move, buckets to carry, and a hundred surfaces to scrub. Part of being a hard worker is understanding that your hard work benefits the team and not just yourself. Craft brewing a home for start-ups and specialists. The teams are small, so everyone has to carry their share of the load to keep the work environment healthy.
Cleanliness
A keg of beer is equal to 165 bottles, or 15.5 gallons. There are 31 gallons of beer in a barrel, so if the brewery you work for is a 10 barrel brewery, their batch size is 310 gallons or about 3,300 bottles. If you are careless in your sanitation, during any part of the brewing process, you could introduce a microbe into the process that will leave you with 3,300 bottles worth of skunky, undrinkable slop. If you’re gonna be a brewer, be fanatically clean.
Be a learner
This field has been around since the ancient Egyptians first left barley out in the rain by mistake. To say there are a million ways of ways crafting this fine beverage may be an understatement. Each brew house takes a different approach to what may sound like the same thing. The way a porter is brewed at Dogfish Head is different from one brewed at Great Divide. Pay attention to their details, how they do what they do, and who does what. Be willing to try new directions and be flexible.
Be flexible
Some days you are going to be the grunt labor moving 100 full bags of grain. Some days you are going to discuss the sexual and asexual strategies of yeast production in differing thermal ranges. You may have to weld, you may have to fix a pump, you may have to rewire a motor. You may have to sort out and do anything that saves your product and gets it into the kegs or bottles. Small business are made great by people willing to be a trier, because triers make money.
Be a brewer
This isn’t just a job; this started with someone deciding they loved beer so much that they would like to try brewing it in their house. Hundreds of bottles later, they rashly decided they could make a living doing it as a business. If you really want to do this, do it at home first. Buy yourself a kit, some buckets, some bottles and stink up your house pretty good. Be fascinated by the reproduction of yeast, bleach the tar out of some bottles, and enjoy a hard-earned flat beer or two. Pay the price of admission and it may help you to earn a living in libations as well.
Originally posted on September 20, 2016 @ 10:43 am