I brewed my last batch of beer in 1999, and I’ve left the whole brewing scene behind me. But, I still feel the pain in my back each morning that reminds me of the physical toll brewing has taken on my body.
By Joel Williams
Published: May, 2006
I brewed my last batch of beer in 1999, and I’ve left the whole brewing scene behind me. But, I still feel the pain in my back each morning that reminds me of the physical toll brewing has taken on my body. However, while going through years of old photos documenting my brewing career, a funny thing happened, all of the old memories came flowing back, and they were mostly positive. Brewing was definitely rewarding but required a lot of hard work.
During my time as a professional brewer I can’t tell you how many times I heard people say what a great job being a brewer must be. The inside joke among my fellow brewers though was that we were nothing more than glorified janitors due to the amount of cleaning and sanitizing required during the brewing process.
Brewing in a small-scale brewery can be quite grueling. A typical brew day started between 6AM and 7AM milling the grain. This meant lugging 50-pound bags of malted barley over your shoulder from a storage area to the mill. A 15-barrel (465 gallons) batch typically required 1500 to 2000 pounds of grain. The milled grain is then mixed with hot water in the mash tun and allowed to sit for about an hour or two while you clean up the mess from milling the grain. After all of the starch in the grain has been converted to sugars, you clarify the liquid (now called wort) and send it to the kettle leaving the spent grain behind. While waiting for the wort to boil, we would have to dispose of the spent grain by shoveling the hot mush into containers and putting them outside where a local farmer would pick them up and use it for feed. Then we would clean the mash tun by hand with a scouring pad. We would boil the wort for 90 minutes and it is during this stage that the hops are added. The early hop additions add bitterness and balance the sweetness provided by the grain sugar. The last hop additions are used for aroma.
During the boil, we sanitized the heat exchanger and fermenter with peracetic acid, so that no beer-spoiling bacteria would interfere with the fermentation process. After boiling the wort, it must be rapidly chilled through a heat exchanger and sent to the fermenter where the yeast is added. After everything is transferred to the fermenter, we cleaned the kettle, heat exchanger and hoses with a powerful caustic solution.
This process may sound simple, but I can’t emphasize enough the physical effort required in producing large amounts of beer. We worked long hours wearing rubber boots on a concrete floor in temperatures that regularly reached well over 100 degrees. If you weren’t sweating, it was probably because you were working in the cooler filtering or transferring the beer to a serving tank. Many a sunny summer day was spent wearing a down jacket in the 38-degree, windowless environment.
Brew Facts:
During the fermentation process (2 to 4 weeks) the yeast absorbs most of the sugar from the wort and undergoes a reproduction process that creates carbon dioxide and alcohol.
A brewpub is a restaurant that makes its own beer to serve on premise. A microbrewery produces product for distribution.
However, when working in a brewpub you have the unique opportunity to be constantly reminded of why you put yourself through this physical abuse. It was common for customers to search out the brewer to convey how much they took pleasure in the product you worked so hard to create. It is those moments I cherish and miss the most. It gave me a satisfying feeling to know that someone enjoyed my product so much that they wanted to meet me or just shake my hand.
Unfortunately, brewers are not paid very well, so, unless you have part ownership in the brewery, it’s very hard to make a good living. There always seemed to be a large pool of younger people willing to enter the field, which kept prevailing wages down. I actually made less money the longer I stayed in the industry and had no health benefits. In my last brewing position, I was not only the head brewer, but I was the only brewer. It was the only brewery, out of the five where I had worked, that expected everything to be done by one person. It was becoming increasingly common for breweries to expect one person to do it all.
Finally, it got to be too much for too little. I couldn’t see a long-term career in it, and, my body just started giving out. I wasn’t a young man anymore. I decided it was time to hang up my brewing boots and call it a day. So, the next time you hoist a tasty microbrew, please, take a moment to appreciate all of the hard work that was put in to creating it.
Starting next month, Joel takes look at brewing from the other side of the bar, as he begins a series of short columns reviewing the local breweries and the many fine beers that can be found in The Bay Area. We can be sure that he will appreciate the task, and all that goes into the products he samples.
