Halfway Home

Hey everybody,

It's hard to believe that it's already halfway through the course and I'm going to be back home in just over a month.  I don't have much on the adventurous or interesting side to tell you, unless you want to hear about the various metabolic pathways for brewer's yeast or how to design a HACCP plan for your brewery.  We've been neck deep in course work other than the weekly placements we have working at an actual professional brewery, though when I use the word "professional" it can be applied very loosely to some of these outfits.  It gives me hope, though, because if some of these clowns can produce and sell beer then why can't I?

I did get a two week mid-course break during which I took the opportunity to satisfy my mandatory "One new country visited per year" rule by taking a bus to Edinburgh, Scotland.  Edinburgh is a small, beautiful, and eminently walkable city.  The weather was pretty crappy and rainy during my two days there so I ended up creating my own brew tour of the city.  I did make it up to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill that was formed from an extinct volcano and has excellent panoramic views of the city.  Other than that, I did the usual touristy stuff like walk around the castle and have a burger.  I tried to get some haggis, but wherever I went that had it on the menu said that they were out of it.  I went down to London for a few days to hang out with my niece (I hope you like baby pictures) and then back up to Belper in Derbyshire for a reunion with Lee, Anna, Mark and Richard.  We try to get together at least once a year for a few days that in retrospect none of us will remember.

Now we're down to the stretch run and I'm trying to focus in like a laser beam.  This is difficult since we are each producing approximately 25 liters of beer per week, most of which ends up back at our dorm.  It's gotten to the point where we're giving bottles away to the security staff.  Here are the pics...

Halfway Home

Take 'er easy,

Dave

Beer School

Hey everybody,

I'm in beer school.  In England.  When I say this out loud it makes me realize how awesome that is.  For the next 10 weeks, I'm going to be studying how to make beer, interning in a brewery, making my own beer and maybe even getting to sell it to some local pubs.  I'm on the Diploma in Brewing Technology course at Brewlab.  No, the other one... in Sunderland.

Around January or February I was actively brewing with a group of home brewers in San Francisco called Brewlab, sending out inquiries to a bunch of brewing schools in the U.S. and in Europe and everyone is telling me that they don't have any availability until 2014 (UC Davis said 2015 at the earliest).  So I'm working part-time and taking some classes and generally trying to figure out what I'm gonna do when I get this email from one of the schools in the UK saying they'd had a cancellation and would I be interested in signing up for the summer 2013 course.  I love British ales.  My work contract ends just before the school's start date.  The school is called Brewlab.  Too... much... serendipity.  Besides, I knew I had to come to England to see my newborn niece Alice.

Of course, summer is a relative term in England.  It's the season where it's slightly less shitty.  I've been here almost two weeks and I've gotten about 6 hours of sun, which I consider above average.  My previous experience had all been around the south, mostly London with a bit of Liverpool and Derby sprinkled in, so when I told my friends that I was going to be spending the summer in the northeast in Sunderland the reaction was universal bewilderment.  One of my English buddies wrote me that, "If you like to shag ugly, illiterate, indecipherable fat birds then it's the perfect place for you."  That sounds like something that should be printed on the cover of the Sunderland tourist brochure.  And when the British are making fun of a people for being ugly, I mean... wow.  Now that I've been here a couple of weeks I can tell you that everything they said was terrifyingly correct.  An incredible percentage of women here enjoy spray tans, which when combined with mascara applied with a paintbrush, neck tattoos, and an apparent disdain for exercise, should give you a typical picture of one of these orange horrors.  The guys aren't much better, with a large contingent of bald mouth-breathers sporting blurry forearm tattoos and wearing England football jerseys.

Okay, all the things I just said are really superficial and snarky (though probably not unfair), I admit that, so let me just say that almost everyone has been incredibly nice and has gone out of their way to make us feel welcome.  The most difficult bit has been getting used to the accent in the northeast, which in Sunderland is Mackem, closely related but not to be confused with the Geordie accent (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhHLmhchLrU) in Newcastle which is about 20 miles away.  A couple of the guys on the course are English and they warned us never to confuse the two and that under no circumstances should we EVER tell anyone in Sunderland that we are fans of the Newcastle football club unless "we want our face kicked in."  Everything in Sunderland shuts down at 6 o'clock except, mercifully, the pubs, so I've been in cask-conditioned ale heaven since my first day in town.

What else?  There are 12 dudes in the class (no women, so you can imagine how quickly things have degenerated), 6 from the U.S., 4 from England, and one each from Norway and Latvia.  A couple of the guys are from Newcastle so they've been giving us the low-down on places to hang out, which has been great, and Newcastle is much nicer and livelier than Sunderland and only about a half hour away on the metro.  We're all living in one building in the university dorms, which is weird, but I have my own room which makes it an upgrade over my usual travel accommodations.  Our head instructor Arthur is a northeast native with 30 years of experience in the brewing industry from micro to big ones like San Miguel, Heineken and Newcastle.  He's a soft-spoken beer encyclopedia with an incredibly dry sense of humor.  I asked him if he'd ever had an accident at one of his breweries where someone fell into one of those giant industrial fermenters and he said only once where a guy committed suicide by jumping in and drowning in the beer.  They didn't discover him until after he'd gone through a few batches in the fermenter, including caustic and acid cleaning. So Arthur says the only difference with those batches is that they had a bit of extra body to them.

Other than that, I've been making myself at home and expect to gain about 10-15 pounds thanks to real ales and Sunday roast.  The northeastern coast is supposed to be beautiful and from what I've seen so far that holds true.  I expect to make quite a few day trips on the weekends so hopefully I'll have some nicer pictures for you going forward.  Here are some pics which admittedly are mostly beer porn...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/nsHpa2vGuWjhNaxu9

Take 'er easy,
Dave