Yankee Brew News Archive

Confessions of a Brewing Intern

Originally Published: 08/97

By: Lauren Clark Durling

A few months ago, I said goodbye to my old life as a cubicle-bound office drone and began a new life as an aspiring professional brewer. I am currently an intern at the Commonwealth Brewing Company in Boston.

While I was watching ER on a recent Thursday night, it struck me how similar my experiences are to those of Carter, the show's earnest young doctor, back when he was an earnest young intern. I imagined the show taking place in a brewpub instead of a hospital:

The scene: Early morning in the city. A light snow dusts the stairs leading to the platform of an elevated subway. Nearby, in the basement of a large brick building, three figures prepare to perform a delicate operation. In the distance, a siren wails.

Dr. Benton: (Striding purposefully through a pair of swinging doors) What have we got here?

Dr. Green: Stout. Three, maybe three-and-a-half days old. Exhibiting signs of advanced fermentation.

Dr. Benton: Did you take a gravity reading?

Dr. Green: Yeah--we're looking at 4.8 degrees Plato.

Dr. Benton: We'll have to perform a transfer right away. Carter, have you got a conditioning tank prepped?

Carter: (Struggling to fasten cumbersome tank door) I'm working on it. (Twenty minutes later) There!

Dr. Benton: Carter, attach a Hanson fitting to the end of this hose.

(Carter hesitantly pulls an object out of a jumble of metal parts.)

Dr. Benton: I said a Hanson fitting, Carter! That's a sanitary clamp connection.

Carter: (Crestfallen) Oh.

Dr. Green: (Returning after a moment of absence) The conditioning tank wasn't holding pressure. I had to refit the door.

Dr. Benton: Carter, there's no excuse for that kind of negligence! There could have been a leak, and that's how beer is lost!

Carter: Right, Dr. Benton. It won't happen again.

Dr. Benton: Okay. We're ready. Carter, switch on the pump. (A few minutes later)

Dr. Green: Good God! The stout's flowing into the I.P.A.! Somebody attached the hose to the wrong tank!

Dr. Benton: Carter, you forgot to write on the chart which tank you prepped?!

Carter: (Ashen-faced) Um . . . yes.

Carter stands there, gloved hands in mid-air, watching dejectedly as Doctors Benton and Green move frantically to save the stout.

I exaggerate slightly. Our beer isn't brewed by doctors. But you get the idea. In a day in the life of a brewing intern, mistakes are made.

I knew that brewing professionally would be much different from brewing at home with malt extract on the odd Sunday. This fact is confirmed anew for me every day I'm at the brewery. Every homebrewer knows that in the process of making beer, there is ample opportunity for error. This is why Charlie Papazian has to coddle us on every other page of The Complete Joy of Homebrewing with the mantra, "Relax. Don't worry. Have a homebrew." Work in a brewery for a day, though, and you'll realize that the problems that can arise in brewing five gallons of beer seem cute next to the potential catastrophes involved in brewing nearly 1,000 gallons of beer.

You say you had to dump out your last batch of homebrew because it was infected? You're sad, but you know it's not the end of the world. You just have to take better precautions next time. There is no place for such nonchalance in large-scale brewing. When you imagine having to dump out one batch containing more beer than you've brewed at home in your entire life, you adopt a whole new reverence for sanitization.

Once upon a time, I thought siphoning my homebrew from bucket to carboy through a 4-foot piece of plastic tubing was a serious task that required patience and precision. Now I'm responsible for moving beer from a vessel at one end of the brewery to a vessel at the other end using an electric pump and a maze of hoses.

It wasn't until after I had been a brewing intern for a while, though, that I realized how a small misstep can lead not only to the ruin of large quantities of beer and expensive pieces of equipment, but also to unique causes of death and disfigurement.

One day, Jeff Charnick, the Commonwealth's head brewer, was showing me how to begin recirculating boiled wort between the kettle and the mash tun. The kettle sits wedged in between the upper and lower floors of the brewpub, so that when you're in the basement, the bottom of the kettle hangs down at about eye level.

To begin recirculation, you have to open a valve at the bottom of the kettle to let the wort flow through a short pipe into the mash tun. To turn the valve handle, you must loosen a large wing nut that holds it in place. What I didn't know is that the same wing nut also holds tight the connection between the kettle opening and the outflow pipe--and is thus the only thing that prevents hundreds of gallons of hot wort from spewing out of the bottom of the kettle. Instead of loosening the wingnut just a little bit to turn the valve handle, I loosened it completely, so that it twirled freely at the end of its threading.

I can't print what Jeff said at that moment. With lightning speed, he screwed the wingnut back on. I stared at him, baffled. Here was a man who looked as if he had just seen his life flash before his eyes.

"That's not supposed to come all the way off," he explained to me with remarkable patience. "We might have just gotten a faceful of 190-degree wort."

After the incident we poured ourselves a pint and informed Stewart Mason, the assistant brewer, that I had invented a new way to kill people.

There are other ways to come to harm in a brewery that, thankfully, I didn't invent. The most common ones seem to be mishaps involving CO2 pressure. Recently, I was trying to remove a bung from a keg without letting the pressure out of the keg first. (One of the challenges of this job is learning to say the word "bung" with a straight face.) Luckily, the pressure hissed out through a small chip I made in the bung instead of launching the bung out of the keg and into my forehead.

This incident was, naturally, witnessed and remarked upon by Jeff, who proceeded to tell a series of cautionary tales about the dangers of working with pressurized containers. He talked of flying bungs hitting ceilings several stories high and doors of large beer tanks being blown off and propelled through glass windows and across entire rooms.

CO2 has the distinction of being a double threat. It cannot only launch objects at deadly velocity when under pressure; it can, when escaping from several large tanks in an enclosed area, fill the air and poison you. CO2 is a helpful toxin, though, in that it gives you a tell-tale headache before knocking you out.

Such are the dangers involved in the pursuit of making beer. Yet risking my life, along with showing an embarrassing lack of mechanical knowledge and working like a dog for (as of now) no pay, are things I gladly accepted when I decided to enter this profession. Brewers can understand this. All the brewers I've met share two things: a love of the product they make and a belief that they are ridiculously lucky to be doing what they do.

Other people, i.e., non-beer drinkers, my mother-in-law--are puzzled by my career change. When I tell them I want to be a brewer, they look at me searchingly, like they're waiting for a punch line. And they don't even know about the threat of being injured by a flying bung.