Places I will go

Today we had a new teacher from Germany who will take us through the next week of production and packaging. We spent most of the day learning about returnable bottle washing. It was a fascinating subject although inapplicable to the North American breweries, which leads me to my next point.

This diploma class is not about learning how to brew on a small brewpub system. It is also not about how to brew on a 100,000hl system. It's a diploma about every system. I feel that some small brewers slam this school because it's full of knowledge that they don't need. I also see that some of the large brewers find that it's full of knowledge that they already know.

Bottom line is that it's a complete brewing education.

I would feel comfortable working in any brewery around the world after this course. Not only that, but I know more about how barley grows and is malted, how yeast metabolizes, how hops are isomerized, how product is stabilized, how product is packaged and how it is sold. Do I need this information to work in any of the breweries small or large? No. But it's this knowledge that makes a brewer grow. I would take this class over again in a heartbeat and suggest it to anybody who considers it.

I find it a little sad that enrollment has been down at the brewing schools in NA. I also believe that if taxes were lower on beer our profit margins would be higher. Our industry would afford more education and our products would be better. The Germans laugh at how little we know about what we are doing. In Germany, it is not uncommon to spend four or five years in school to be a brewer. I'll spend three months. And that is not short enough to our standards! Enrollment is down at UCDavis and in the early part of this century our oldest brewing school was sold to Lallemand in Canada.

J.E. Siebel was born in Dusseldorf in 1845 and immigrated to America opening his chemical laboratory in Chicago 1868. In 1872 he opened Siebel's Institute of Technology and wrote extensively on the subject of brewing. After a while the Diploma program was offered at the school along with other subjects in German and English. In the year before Prohibition was put into effect, J.E. Siebel passed away. However, the Siebel Institute survived Prohibition by teaching yeast production in the bread industry. After Prohibition the brewing industry in America soared. With F.P Siebel Sr. the classes grew. One can guess looking at the class sizes before and after WWII that the growth in brewing sky-rocketed when the nation was building up. The 1943-1944 class was nearly ten and the 1949 class was nearly 50.

Although I'm a huge fan and supporter of the craft brew revolution in the 80's, 90's and 2000's, I do wonder what more education would have done. Now I'm not saying anyone without a formal education is making bad beer, but I am saying that many failures could have been avoided. What would it be like if every brewer had the financial capacity of learning every logistic thing he or she could about their trade? I know coming from a plumber's background, where I learned everything through trial and error, that if there were a class I could take on my job I would heartily take it.

Here's the places we will go in Europe:
Oettinger brewery, KHS bottling plant, Orval, Cantillion, Heineken, Koeingshoven, Uerige, Rastal glassware, Kolner brewery in Koln, Weyermann, Krones and many more...

to learn more about Siebel's history check out my reference:
http://siebelinstitute.com/introduction/