So You Think You Want to Open a Brewery
- Aug 14, 2021
- 89
- tiantai
At my first brewery job as an assistant brewer at The 21st Amendment in San Francisco, I was crazy-disappointed when I started and the head brewer only had me coming in for cleaning days. "But I want to make beer," I remember thinking, because I, like so many other homebrewers, thought the work was boiling things and adding hops. Little did I know, Zambo had put me right into the thick of the beer making process: cleaning everything.
Beer requires an absurd amount of sanitary vessels to make and the fermentation and packaging process leaves a trail of very dirty vessels, tools, and instruments in its wake. If you're considering this line of work, you better be the kind of person who finds doing the dishes relaxing. Cleaning floors, cleaning tanks, cleaning hoses, cleaning kegs, cleaning glasses, cleaning drains, cleaning parts: every day in a brewery starts with cleaning and ends with cleaning. I've used the word "cleaning" 10 times so far in this paragraph and it does not begin to come close to the amount of cleaning (11) that goes on in even the smallest brewery.
You're a clean freak? Great! To be a good brewer, you'll also need to be patient, methodical, and not easily bored. Even when you're brewing a new beer every day, the process is almost completely identical each time. Huge differences in recipes reflect only small changes in the workday of the brewer. Because the process is so repetitive and the differences in process so small, record-keeping is incredibly important. Almost any action in a brewery can be expressed as "Clean, record data, action, record data, clean."
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Another surprise in the life of a brewer: there's a lot of basic handyman work involved. Breweries use equipment in really hostile ways: everything is wet all the time, the equipment is cleaned with harsh chemicals and near boiling water, and everything is being used constantly. Things in the brewery break, invariably at very inconvenient times, and you'll need to fix them. Folks with knowledge of small motors and electrician training are revered, and stainless steel welders are legendary. Are you ready?
In addition to being wrong about the workload before I started working in a brewery, I was wrong about the beer drinking. Everyone thinks brewers are constantly drinking beer, and they are, but it's a strange kind of drinking. You sip a beer, notice something about it, become curious how that thing manifested in the beer, pull up the brew log, compare it to other brew logs, make everyone else in the brewery taste it, reference the guidelines for brewing that beer, call your boss, debate the personality of that beer, question its necessity in the brewery's portfolio, and then return to a warm, flat beer. Flavor and process become the same and it can make drinking beer significantly less enjoyable if you can't turn that analysis off.
You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned 'knowledge of the brewing process' as an essential facet of a brewer's qualifications. Knowledge of the biological and chemical science behind brewing process is certainly useful, but your job as a brewer will be cleaning and paperwork first and foremost. A couple years ago I interviewed at a mid-sized brewery, and they asked me what I felt were my weak points. I replied that I didn't have a formal brewing education. The head brewer's response is lodged in my mind because it was so revealing. "Oh, we don't care about that. We can teach you about brewing."
One last warning: you'd better enjoy being at work, because you will be there all the time. Fermentation is a 24/7 activity that doesn't really care about your weekend plans. And you're doing it for the love of the job: you will not make a lot of money as a brewer. I had an unpaid internship before I got my first $8-an-hour brewing job in San Francisco, and that's par for the course. At the beginning of your brewing career, you likely need to have more than one job to pay the bills, and you might want to consider living with your parents for the discounted rent.
Still want to be a brewer? I hope so! I still believe that brewing is magical. Sure, it's hot, dirty, and wet. It's labor-intensive work that will make you forget how to enjoy drinking beer and give you some borderline-OCD cleaning tendencies. But it's also an ancient art, one that yields deliciousness at the end of the process, and I can promise you there is nothing quite as fulfilling as having people enjoy beer you made.
Beer requires an absurd amount of sanitary vessels to make and the fermentation and packaging process leaves a trail of very dirty vessels, tools, and instruments in its wake. If you're considering this line of work, you better be the kind of person who finds doing the dishes relaxing. Cleaning floors, cleaning tanks, cleaning hoses, cleaning kegs, cleaning glasses, cleaning drains, cleaning parts: every day in a brewery starts with cleaning and ends with cleaning. I've used the word "cleaning" 10 times so far in this paragraph and it does not begin to come close to the amount of cleaning (11) that goes on in even the smallest brewery.
You're a clean freak? Great! To be a good brewer, you'll also need to be patient, methodical, and not easily bored. Even when you're brewing a new beer every day, the process is almost completely identical each time. Huge differences in recipes reflect only small changes in the workday of the brewer. Because the process is so repetitive and the differences in process so small, record-keeping is incredibly important. Almost any action in a brewery can be expressed as "Clean, record data, action, record data, clean."
Another surprise in the life of a brewer: there's a lot of basic handyman work involved. Breweries use equipment in really hostile ways: everything is wet all the time, the equipment is cleaned with harsh chemicals and near boiling water, and everything is being used constantly. Things in the brewery break, invariably at very inconvenient times, and you'll need to fix them. Folks with knowledge of small motors and electrician training are revered, and stainless steel welders are legendary. Are you ready?
In addition to being wrong about the workload before I started working in a brewery, I was wrong about the beer drinking. Everyone thinks brewers are constantly drinking beer, and they are, but it's a strange kind of drinking. You sip a beer, notice something about it, become curious how that thing manifested in the beer, pull up the brew log, compare it to other brew logs, make everyone else in the brewery taste it, reference the guidelines for brewing that beer, call your boss, debate the personality of that beer, question its necessity in the brewery's portfolio, and then return to a warm, flat beer. Flavor and process become the same and it can make drinking beer significantly less enjoyable if you can't turn that analysis off.
You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned 'knowledge of the brewing process' as an essential facet of a brewer's qualifications. Knowledge of the biological and chemical science behind brewing process is certainly useful, but your job as a brewer will be cleaning and paperwork first and foremost. A couple years ago I interviewed at a mid-sized brewery, and they asked me what I felt were my weak points. I replied that I didn't have a formal brewing education. The head brewer's response is lodged in my mind because it was so revealing. "Oh, we don't care about that. We can teach you about brewing."
One last warning: you'd better enjoy being at work, because you will be there all the time. Fermentation is a 24/7 activity that doesn't really care about your weekend plans. And you're doing it for the love of the job: you will not make a lot of money as a brewer. I had an unpaid internship before I got my first $8-an-hour brewing job in San Francisco, and that's par for the course. At the beginning of your brewing career, you likely need to have more than one job to pay the bills, and you might want to consider living with your parents for the discounted rent.
Still want to be a brewer? I hope so! I still believe that brewing is magical. Sure, it's hot, dirty, and wet. It's labor-intensive work that will make you forget how to enjoy drinking beer and give you some borderline-OCD cleaning tendencies. But it's also an ancient art, one that yields deliciousness at the end of the process, and I can promise you there is nothing quite as fulfilling as having people enjoy beer you made.
