And the Brewing Begins

I started living the dream today when I pulled into the 5 Seasons parking lot and began my unofficial apprenticeship with the brewer there. I woke up early, drove over to the brewpub, carried scalding hot water across the building to dump into a bright tank for the caustic cycle to clean it, rinsed out some casks, , hefted several hundred pounds of malt up into the grain mill hopper in 55 Kg increments to grind malt for tomorrow's batch and then vacuumed up the mill room, scrubbed buckets, helped transfer a beer from the fermenter into the serving tanks, hefted giant grates still steaming from their boiling water bath minutes earlier into place inside the mash tun, disassembled tubing to dunk it into a caustic solution to clean, and crawled around on my hands and knees looking for the tiny black gasket that had fallen off the bottling wand that the company that makes said wand won't replace without purchase of an entirely new wand. During the process, I lost several pounds through my sweat glands. Several of the jobs I did involved risk of serious injury from chemicals burns, scalding, crushing or falling if I had gotten careless.

That probably doesn't sound like the dream job to most people, but for many beer geeks and homebrewers, the idea of brewing your own beer on a commercial basis is a major source of daydreaming. With the exception of the homebrewers, many beergeeks don't realize the level of work involved in brewing at the brewpub and microbrewer level. Luckily, I'd spent enough time homebrewing and enough time talking to real pros about their experiences for articles in the Southern Brew News and my old website, TheBeerCellar.com, that I knew better. I knew going in that this would be real work and occasionally dangerous. Sure the guys at the Anheuser-Busch breweries get to sit around in the control room and push buttons and let underlings do the few parts that aren't completely automated yet, but small breweries still have systems that require everything but the heating of water and transfer of wort and beer to be done by hand.

Sadly, I enjoyed every minute of it today. It's a little like my favorite job so far. When I was 13 (don't worry, there'll be a post about this next week), I worked in my uncle's machine shop and got to run cutting torches, hydraulic bending and drill presses, friction saws and other dangerous work with sheet metal. I came home tired and dirty every night (the carbon that coated the outside of the steel we used rubbed of and left you looking like a coal miner by lunch) but never dreaded getting up the next day to go back to work that summer. So far brewing is like that. You're not doing the same thing for hours on end and you're doing something physical and are either doing something that keeps your entire attention to make sure you're doing it right or safely or something that frees your mind to think. I came home in a great mood today even though my clothes were still soaked through from sweat and water hoses. I still doubt I'll ever do this professionally, but right now I doubt I'd turn down an offer that paid me enough to make up for the change in cost of living for having to move nearby the brewery. It's just that job security concerns and loss of my state pension will probably keep me from seeking out a job that's not known for being a source of hefty paychecks. We'll have to see if I still feel that way by Friday.

Tomorrow we harvest yeast from the fermenter we transferred beer from today, clean that tank, actually brew that IPA I ground malt for, and bottle from a keg of another beer.

I really wish I were a woman right now so I could make a Punky Brewster joke, but alas, I have a penis and therefore am no brewster. (For those of you less in the know on proper etymology for brew-house personnel, brewster is the proper term for a female brewer.)