When you talk to brewmasters, you hear the word 'fun' a lot.
""I liked it so I changed my major to food science when I was in college,
got my bachelor's in food science, then did an internship with Coors, and
then I've just been working for brewers ever since," says Hull. "I have a
bachelor's in food science and a master's in brewing science, and our brewmaster
also has a master's degree in brewing science."
"By nature, beer is fun, so the people involved are typically fun," says
Tracy Hurst, founder and co-owner of Metropolitan Brewing in Chicago.
Hurst says there other common threads among people in the brewing industry.
"We're all really hardworking and we're all willing to work physical as
well as mental tasks and organizational tasks," says Hurst. "We share a lot
of things. We share tools, we share supplies, we help each other out when
we're in binds, we do events together, we cross-promote each other."
Hurst's brewery is a craft brewery. This means they produce less than six
million barrels of beer per year. She says craft brewers help each other out
to win market share from the larger brewers.
"Craft brewers are technically competitors, but we're not really -- we
see ourselves as colleagues, as a group, competing against macro-industrial
beer," Hurst says. "So we help each other out to achieve that goal of acquiring
more and more of the market share of beer drinking. All 1,800 craft breweries
in the United States account for a whopping five percent of the beer market.
Bud, Miller, Coors have the other 95 percent. So we work together to chip
away at that number and get a larger market share each year."
Hurst's husband, Doug, is the head brewer at their brewery. In addition
to administration, marketing, and bookkeeping, Hurst helps her husband with
the brewing.
"I do a lot of the heavy labor," Hurst says with a laugh. "He does too.
Doug makes all the decisions in terms of what to put in the beer, the ingredients
and the ratios and things like that. I lift a lot of grain, I shovel grain
out of the mash tun when we're done with it." [A mash tun is a vessel used
for mashing as well as wort separation.]
"I help keep Doug on task in terms of remembering to take his measurements
and things like that," Hurst adds. "And then I help in tasting the beer and
choosing how we'll adjust beers if necessary.
"When you work with an agricultural product like grain and hops, things
change over time based on growing season and things like that, so we make
decisions together on how things taste and whether or not we're going to tweak
a beer or something like that. And then I do all of the production scheduling,
so Doug looks at his calendar to find out what he's brewing on a given day,
or what we're doing on a given day, based on my calendar."
Mike Kelly is a brewmaster who has been brewing for 17 years.
"I was drawn to the craft aspect of it, I guess," says Kelly. "I've only
worked in smaller breweries. But even at larger breweries, the craft is still
there, they just have much greater efficiencies and more complicated tools.
I really like that, I like the tradition of it. People have been doing it
for a long time."
Beer drinkers sometimes say that large breweries produce beers without
much flavor. Brewmasters at smaller breweries pride themselves on making beers
with distinctive flavors.
"I like the idea of making something that people can enjoy," says Kelly.
"Especially with craft beers, it's not just something to get drunk off of
-- it's something you can actually sit down and enjoy the taste of and compare
them. People find their favorites and they have favorite ingredients... and
that appeals to me."
Kelly says brewing is a lot of hard work. But it's also for people who
can solve problems.
"What I need on the brewing side are smart people who don't mind getting
their hands dirty, so you have to be able to persevere in that respect," says
Kelly. "That's just a part of the job -- you have to clean, get dirty, and
use chemicals when you're cleaning and all that kind of stuff, but you still
need the brains to know what's going on."
"Mechanical inclination is good," says Hurst. "You've got to fix a lot
of things on the fly. There is not a lot of technical support for our tools
and our equipment, things like that, so you have to be able to learn on the
fly."
"I think the most important personal quality is patience because there's
often something going wrong," says Hull. "[It's important] just to be patient
and help people with their problems. A lot of your job is problem solving.
There's human error because there’s a lot of things happening at once, so
it's important to be relaxed and to be able to work with people. People skills
are important.""
What are some examples of problems that can come up in a brewery?
"If a person types in a wrong number, accidentally hooks something up incorrectly
or a temperature setting is set incorrectly -- that's one of the most common
ones. A tank could be chilled down before it's supposed to be or [set] to
the wrong temperature," says Hull.
"And then there are also physical problems, like if a machine
jams or clogs or breaks right in the middle of a run.""
Another problem that can arise is a power failure. If it happens in the
middle of production, steps must be quickly taken to save the beer.
But it's not just the beer that must be watched carefully and taken care
of. Brewers need to take care of themselves too. Hurst and her husband have
learned that being healthy, both mentally and physically, is essential if
you're going to run your own brewery.
"I've found you need to take care of yourself," says Hurst. "You need
to be healthy. We're vegan, we do yoga every day, we get our sleep. We don't
go out drinking with our friends as much as we used to, simply because we
have to use that time for self-care."