Hop burn NE style

I'm not sure he said that people made bad beer just that educated people made better beer. Very different things. Kinda how lots of chefs aren't classically trained make great food but not as good as French trained chefs.

 

Tim Clifford
Henry Nguyen

Two more pretty solid examples. Their beers are generally well received.

 

Agreed.

To that I'll respond thusly:

I'm happy to continue to debate this subject, but I feel as if we're going around in circles. Nobody said that brewing school is needed to make great beer or that untrained brewers automatically make bad beer. Just that a brewing education allows one to make better beer.

Just like you could create a list of great brewers that have no formal education, I could create a list of bad to mediocre brewers that didn't have an education. I believe that it would be very challenging to make a list of formally trained brewers who create bad to mediocre beer, though.

Can we possibly agree that a formal brewing education isn't going to make one's beer worse?

 

This is the closest I can find to the statement I falsely recall you making. There is reference to the falsely recalled post, which makes me wonder, but I digress. I do agree that through tribal knowledge brewing has grown by leaps and bounds. I don't agree that it's only brewing science, or only blind experimentation that is to blame for this. It's a balance. While education is helpful, I do feel that it creates a rigidity to the brewer. If all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. A brewer needs artistic flexibility and imagination as well. The other downside is that if every brewer learns how to brew from the same institutions, where is the room for ingenuity? Is it any wonder that the innovation in the most ubiquitous beer style has come from brewers who have no institutional biases?
Conversely a brewer can have a vivid imagination and brew diacetyl bombs because of a lack of formal training.
In the end I can agree that a brewer needs to know basic brewing practices and off flavor trouble shooting, but institutional brewing practices are not necessarily the way to brew the best beer.

 

I get your point but I think you should consider that there are many brewers with formal educations making crap beer. More so actually than make good beer in my opinion. There are fewer quality brewers out there than bad brewers in general. My point is education is not a guarantee to to making great beer nor is it a requirement.

Does it correlate more to better brewers? Probably, but I'll bet less so in the future given the growing popularity of this "hobby" and craft beer. There is so much great information and equipment out there that can give an ambitious brewer a great head start.

I see it quite a bit now in New England. Some of the best beers I've had over the last couple years were from brewers with no formal education. Brewers see the likes of Tree House, Trillium, Jacks Abby and Night Shift and get inspired. Those are just a few examples of breweries that grew incredibly, and continue to, in this area. I think an education can accelerate some things for a brewer but on-the-job experience and training is even better....training by someone with an education of course...wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

 

This, I think, is the disconnect. Education and artistic flexibility/ingenuity aren't mutually exclusive. There are TONS of formally educated brewers that are very flexible. Mitch Steele, anyone? Matt Cole of Fatheads? Matthew Brynildson of Firestone Walker? Obviously, I could go on, but you get my drift.

So . . . everyone who set out to copy Heady Topper is now an innovator? I think not.

 

Umm . . . example(s)?

And by "crap beer" do you mean "bad/flawed beer" or "beer that you just don't like"?

And nobody ever said that it was.

Agreed on this bit. Much, much more solid information out there than there was even 5 years ago and light-years more than 15 or 20. Difficulty? Getting people to read it and abandon the brewing fallacies that they were taught when they first started making beer.

Jack Hendler of Jack's Abbey worked in the brewing industry before starting it, but I understand your point about the other three.

Don't know if it's "better" per se, but an education without real-world application means very little. Same goes for the opposite, but you can learn on the job by doing. You really can't absorb a formal education just by doing what someone shows you to do without any explanation behind it. IMO, the motivation or the "why" behind doing things is just as important as the "how". Most brewers have the "how" down, but a surprising minority have the "why". That's decidedly less than a good thing. I can give you examples of why that's bad, if you like, btw.

 

Well, it's been fun but my personal take away from this debate is I prefer my home brew, be it better or worse by lack of or over education, over the majority of educat d Brewers/breweries.

Could be I am biased, spoiled by freshness or am just damn ignorant to what is better. I'll never know cause I ain't goin ta

 

You high on your own supply, brah?

All kidding aside, I think a lot of us do. If we didn't, why would be keep brewing beer at home?

Could be all of those things.

 

I feel that the first set of brewers you mention all brew antiquated versions of beers pioneered by Sierra Nevada, and the originator of Heady Topper falls into the "no institutional training" camp. You'll have to bring something better to the table than that I'm afraid.

 

Care to give examples? I find the four portfolios very different, but that might be just me.

But that wasn't my point, was it? My point was that you said that brewers were "innovating" by brewing NEIPAs. I don't believe that to be the case. Most are just copying Kimmich. I also wouldn't consider Kimmich to be untrained, because even though he didn't attend brewing school, he DID brew with Greg Noonan for quite some time and if that's not education, I don't know what is. Also, keep in mind that the "innovation" of Heady Topper was an accident. He just applied West Coast hopping to what he learned with Noonan. He had no idea it was going to produce hazy beer.

Better?

 

You've been arguing for institutionalized brewing education. Kimmich is not an example of your institutional learning facility trained brewer. He is the product of an apprenticeship. That's not what your initial argument implied when you interjected it into my his forum. But what the hell. I'll entertain your subterfuge.
Stone. Firestone, and fatheads all brew beers that are similar to those in Sierra Nevada's portfolio. I don't see the ingenuity or innovation.

 

No, you're right, it wasn't. But I did later modify my stance to include apprenticeships.

Not sure if I agree with that, but "proving" so would take us even more off-topic than we already are.

I simply think that the more you learn the better of a brewer you become. You, apparently, do not share this opinion. I'm OK with that.

 

My argument has always been that a brewer does not need a formal education from an institution to be one of the best in the industry, which piggybacks off my argument that not all brewing practices need a scientific research study to be valid brewing practices. I feel you have danced around enough, I can't hit a moving target.

 

Geez. l for one believe that Kimmich is better than nothing. Even if he didn't attend one of the aforementioned institutions nor did he study under someone who did. Anyway, point taken on the whole understanding the science argument but, IMO, it seems somewhat akin to saying that you can't really know / be good at computer science unless you went to MIT, Berkeley, etc. (or studied under someone who did). This thread did take on a bit of a course correction along the way but I believe that analogy gets to the underlying theme the debate at hand seems to be poking at.

That's it for me. Now quietly riding off into the sunset.

 

I'm just responding to what people are writing. If that causes me to dance a little, so be it.

That said, never have I ever said, in this thread or otherwise, that a formal brewing education is a prerequisite to brewing great beer nor have I ever said that all brewing practices need scientific research to be sound.

I have said, however, that both things do, indeed, benefit the brewer and his or her end product.

 

Jason, in post #80 he stated:

“If you don't think that you can taste science, you should look into the percentage of excellent brewers that have received a proper brewing education in comparison to those that haven't.”

And then in post #94 he defined “proper brewing education”:

“Weihenstephan, UC Davis, Siebel, etc.”

He has most certainly ‘moved the goal posts’ in this thread discussion.

Cheers!

 

I certainly wouldn't agree with that and I definitely stand by my initial assertion that there are a greater percentage of formally trained brewers making great beer than there are untrained brewers.

Not sure how I'd go about proving that assertion, though.

 

At the end of the day neither of us can definitively state better beer is directly or is not directly a product of a higher education in brewing sciences. I do believe we agree that a brewer has to be aware of good brewing practices, however when it comes down to something as subjective as our own palates making the deciding choice for our minds I feel there is no common ground between our values as beer drinkers @EvenMoreJesus . I will say brewers seem to need imagination and ingenuity now more than ever based on the fickle fan base beer enjoys right now. I think that's reflected in the sales numbers for breweries like stone and firestone walker.

 

No, you're right. We can't.

Agreed.

There's probably more than is reflected by our discussion in this thread.

Agreed again. I have a feeling, however, that most breweries would kill to be in the position Stone and FSW are in, as they are two VERY successful breweries.