So you want to work in a brewery...

People often seem to have the idea that working in a brewery is all fun.  Well, it can be.  The people are great and there's beer everywhere!  This is an industry completely focused on making people happy.  If you don't mind hard physical work, often monotonous tasks, or being constantly aware of potentially dangerous situations, then this may be for you.

I am a teacher during the school years and work in breweries during my summers.  Although I will often intentionally avoid  specifying the origin brewery of particular thoughts, I have worked at Craggie Brewing Company (Asheville, NC - no longer operating), Asheville Brewing Company (Asheville, NC) and am now at the Carolina Brewery (Pittsboro, NC).  

How I got into the breweries:  

Yeah, kegs.

    My first summer I contacted several breweries in the Asheville area with no responses.  I then sent them all emails with the subject line "free labor."  Craggie took me on and we called it an unpaid internship.  I worked hard and regularly got growlers of beer as payment.  

    As I approached Craggie about the following summer, I was nudged toward the next door brewery as Craggie was in bad business shape.  The head brewer of Craggie took me over to the Asheville Brewing Company and got me summer work with them.  Halfway through the summer they decided to pay me as I was working 40 hour weeks.  

    After working hard and learning a lot at Asheville Brewing, I learned that the following summer I'd be in Durham.  Around the holidays I made a few brewery visits, filled out applications, and drank a few beers.  Shortly before the summer I made more phone calls and The head brewer at Carolina Brewery invited me in to talk about the summer.  We ended up having a great conversation and now I'm at the Carolina Brewery!

Here are some thoughts on working in a brewery:

--Happy People--  Working in a brewery doesn't pay a great deal.  When you couple the low pay with the physical demands of the job you end up with people who want to be there.  Many people work high-paying jobs which they do not enjoy and this is the opposite of that.

--Mashing Out--  This is the process of taking the spent grains out of the mash tun and cleaning out the mash tun by getting into it.  Every brewery has a setup by which to take the grains to an area from which a farmer usually takes them.  This process varies widely as it is a relatively simple task, but is never at the top of the list of fun jobs at a brewery.  After removing all of the grain through the use of a hoe and a flat rake-like tool, the next part is to get into the mash tun with a water hose and scrubby pad.  In this small area in which you have to crouch as you move around you have to lift up the false bottom panels one by one and spray them out, which can be tricky in such close quarters.  I enjoy that, during this job, time flies.  

--Physical Acclimation--  I teach during the year, so I don't have a physically demanding job.  Therefore, when I begin work in June each summer I have a period of a couple of weeks during which my body as to acclimate to the job.  The first week is usually pretty bad, with a lot of sore muscles.  The second week isn't usually as bad.  By the third week, I'm back into it with the occasional aches.  These first two weeks are usually pretty rough, but it gets better shortly thereafter.

--Milling--  The grains for brewing (mostly barley) usually arrive unmilled.  The goal of milling is to "crack" the outer covering of the grain just enough to allow the hot water of the mash to penetrate all of its contents while still leaving large enough parts of it intact to act as a natural filter for small sediment at the end of the mash.  Producing 15 barrels of an average strength beer requires somewhere in the ballpark of 850 lbs. of grain.  This translates to 16 or 17 bags of grain which must be brought to the mill, opened, and poured into the mill one at a time.  Some breweries require the milled grain to be hefted up to the opening of the mash tun and poured in manually, while some breweries have auger and pipe system which delivers it directly to the mash tun.

Filling kegs off a CO2 Tank (the main tank
was empty) while mashing out.

--Kegs are Heavy--  An empty keg weighs just shy of 30 lbs. whereas beer is about 8.43 lbs./gallon (8.43 lbs./gallon is for water, but it's close).  A standard 1/2 barrel keg holds 15.5 gallons of beer.  30 + (8.43*15.5) = roughly 160 lbs.  On my first day at Craggie we moved approximately 60 of these kegs into a small walk-in cooler and stacked them three high.  It should be noted that my wife found me at the Thirsty Monk after a few Belgians as that was a hard first day.  (160*60= 4.8 tons)

--Filling Kegs--  There's not really much to it, actually.  Most breweries fill them manually which first consists of hooking up a line with a tap valve on it to a bright tank or serving tank.  While filling, what is usually the gas input to the keg is actually an output for the carbon dioxide in the keg.  The only real skill in filling a keg comes in regulating the output so that the keg fills quickly, but not so quickly that the beer foams too much.  There has to be head pressure if this process is to work smoothly.

--Chemicals--  The cleaning chemical used by all breweries I've seen is an alkaline caustic cleaner.  Craft breweries usually have a barrel of concentrated caustic which is really nasty stuff.  I noticed on the Anheuser-Busch tour that they have a large reservoir of it which has dedicated lines leading it through the brewing vessels directly between brews.  The usual protocol is to put on gloves and carefully pump it from the barrel into a container which has a spring to keep it closed when not intentionally open.  I heard a story of a woman who was trying her hand in the brewhouse, and doing a great job, and reached into a bucket bare-handed to retrieve a fitting, just to discover the bucket was full of caustic.  Luckily, an experienced brewer was nearby and quickly sprayed off her arm with beer from a fermenter which neutralizes caustic.

--Music--  While working in a brewery you will be introduced to new music.  Many jobs have music constantly playing to spare you from the monotony present in various tasks.  A few examples of monotonous tasks in a brewhouse include cleaning kegs, scrubbing the floor, wiping down fermenting vessels, and filling growlers.  Most anything else in the brewery could break without disastrous results, but if the stereo was to explode I feel the brewery might stop!

--Young'uns--  The brewhouse is a place for young men.  I mean no offense to women, but my observations do not include the extended stays of any women.  Also, I have only had the pleasure of working with one brewhouse employee over the age of 32 (56, but he's an interesting case).  I just turned 28 years old yesterday and asked the other guys their ages at Carolina Brewery.  Several of the guys are 24 and couple of them are 28 or 29.  For the most part, once you hit the realm of 30 years old it's time to either shift the mode of your employment or become a head brewer who spends more time making decisions, crunching numbers, and delegating tasks.

--Odd Tasks--  I theorize that as a short term employee who has been added to the usual clockwork team I am often tasked with jobs which usually sit on the back-burner.  One brewery dealt with a problem where mice were getting into the grain storage resulting in a loss of entire bags of grain.  A couple of us stationed ourselves in the warehouse with pellet guns and waited.  Just the other day I spent a morning on a tall ladder with an extending duster doing battle with the cobwebs which had built up.  One task, which unexpectedly took an entire day, was insulating the bottom of a glycol tank.  The tank is very cold and condenses a large volume of water on the outside, running to the bottom to which I was fitting and gluing sheets of insulation.  Although it felt like a futile task, due to the excessive condensation, it now looks excellent and is well insulated.

"Beer Culture," by Matthew Kelley, 2007

In 2007, Ferguson, the Ampersand, and I released a beer newsletter entitled "The Beer Guys."  This was the introduction:


"Volume 1, Issue 1" of "The Beer Guys"

       "Beer is the oldest beverage in the history of humanity.  Yeah, people drank from streams and squeezed udders before beer existed, but beer was the first liquid drink that was created by man specifically to quench thirst and be enjoyed.  It came as a byproduct of making bread, which any history teacher will tell you was essential for the establishment of permanent human settlements.  Large numbers of people were staying in one place, and they all had to do something after toiling all day at mundane specialized jobs.  In addition to being a relatively clean beverage that provided nutrients lost in a sedentary diet, beer was a vehicle to building campfire relationships during all-too-necessary periods of relaxation.  Common experiences, concerns, and jokes were shared, and this bound men together for the inevitable trials of inter-urban warfare.  Campfire stories laid the foundations for all of human literature, with direct descendants found in the Greek epic, or the Viking saga.  Consuming beer brought men together in a manner that facilitated the development of human organization and culture.  So, when you sip your beer in a friendly and comfortable environment, surrounded by all good people who understand you, remember that you are taking part in one of the oldest aspects of civilization; so much so that calling it a tradition would be an understatement.  Flee the noisy frat house and the dingy, lonely watering hole for a place where you can share your cares, feelings, and joys with your fellow man and receive the same.  Beer always allows room for those who are open to understanding its mystique.  As long as you are telling stories and bonding together with a grain brew in your hands, your spirits are but one breath away from the cornerstone of what makes us truly human."

                                                                               ~Matt Kelley
             
                                                                                The Ampersand in
                                                                                "Gudger & Ferguson's"