What I Learned As A Professional Brewer

I am sure almost every home brewer has had the thought of what it would be like to turn a home brewing hobby into a career. To earn money from doing something you love I’m sure is high on everyone’s list of a fulfilling job.

I have actually had that opportunity. I was a professional brewer, the head brewer of a small brewery for 3-4 years and this is what I learned from taking my beloved hobby and making it my job.

My Background

I have been home brewing for as long as I have been legally able to drink (if not longer) so around 14-15 years. It wasn’t until I was writing about brewing on this website that I really considered becoming a brewer.

In fact, my brother was actually a brewer at a large regional brewery and whilst I was brewing at home I really had no interest in joining him in the brewhouse.

During the course of writing articles for this website I volunteered at a few breweries to get the taste of what it was like to brew commercially. It was around this time that someone read Home Brew Answers and said they were planning a new brewery and wanted some input. This is where it all started.

From Home Brewer To Head Brewer

As things started moving forward the owner turned plan into reality and I was offered a position as brewer.

The brewhouse was 3BBL so pretty small meaning it was just me and the owner. I was in charge of all brewing, packaging into cask and bottles and all the manual labour (cleaning) around the brewhouse. The sales, marketing and overall vision for the brewery was the realm of the owner.

The brewery consisted of Hot Liquor Tank, Mash Tun and Kettle and to begin with 2 fermenters with cooling jackets, this was later expanded to 4 fermenters one being 6BBL to accomodate 2 back to back brews.

As breweries go this is on the small side for a commercial operation. The brew length was roughly 900-1000 pints for context but for me being a home brewer this was a massive leap.

Welcome To The Big Leagues! (Relatively)

Becoming a professional brewer in a town like Falmouth in Cornwall, where there isn’t much work, was a dream come true. Starting to actually brew beers commercially was more of a baptism of fire.

There is a story about Sierra Nevada brewing their pale ale time and time again to get it just right on their first brew kit. I think they brewed their pale ale 10 or 11 times. Now, we didn’t have to brew our first beer this many times but it was a good 5 – 6 brews until we had something exactly as we wanted.

All that beer, around 2800 litres was run down the drain. The thing with a commercial operation is that you have to sell the product, if the product is not 100% right, you cannot sell it.

Once we got to grips with the brewery plant things all settled into place. The range of beers grew and we were off and running.

Lessons From Brewing Beer As A Job

Brewing beer for a job definitely involves a different mindset to just brewing beers for your own consumption. This is what I learnt as a professional brewer.

Brewing The Same Beer Consistently, Every Time

Most home brewers will only ever brew beers once. As a professional brewer we did occasional one off beers but you have to get used to the fact you will be brewing the same beer over and over and over.

Getting a beer exactly the same every time you brew is a lot harder than most people realise. The average drinker won’t notice subtle differences from batch to batch but when you taste the beer each time, at each stage of the brew you’ll notice these minor differences. Every batch is a test to see how consistently you can make the same product.

What You Want To Brew Is Not Necessarily What People Want To Buy

Cornwall in the UK doesn’t have the most progressive beer scene. Things are changing but most of the beer scene in Cornwall is definitely a few years behind the rest of the UK.

Pub landlords would always ask for pale, low alcohol session beers below 4% ABV. The price point on these beers is lower, people can drink them in the afternoon and enjoy the Cornish sunshine.

We brewed a 3.8% beer with Citra. Over the summer we couldn’t keep up with demand. Some weeks this is the only beer we would brew. It was by no means the most exciting beer and became a chore to brew time and time again but this is what everybody wanted, so this is what we had to brew.

The Imperial Stouts and Double IPAs are few and far between.

There Is No Downtime

Brewing at home is a pleasure. I mash in, setup a playlist on Spotify and kick back. Start the boil and flick through books and take notes.

Commercial brewing is obviously not the same. There was next to no downtime brewing professionally and, of course, it is a business so why would there be.

A typical day brewing would involve the following:

• Sanitising casks.
• Filling, fining and stacking filled casks.

• Prepping grain bill for brew and mashing in.
• Cleaning down newly emptied fermenter, prepping and sanitising to fill up with wort again.
• Weighing out hops for the beer that is being transferred to the kettle.
• Hot caustic cleaning of casks recently returned from pubs and bars.
• Preparing yeast for pitching at the end of the brew.
• Emptying spent grain from the mash tun and delivering to a nearby farm.
• Cleaning the brewery after finishing the brew.
• Setting temperature controllers.

The list could go on but the point is, there is a lot going on and I liked being busy but it was by no means a brew like I would do at home.

I Didn’t Feel Like Brewing At Home

This was one of the biggest downsides to brewing professionally to me. I guess this might be different for everyone but I tended to not want to brew at the weekends.

If I had been brewing all week at work then I couldn’t summon the motivation to brew much at home anymore. I still worked on ideas and test batches for beers we might possibly make at the brewery but the ideas were mainly brewery focussed from then on, not personal beers.

You’ll Never Run Out Of Volunteers

It seemed like every week that we would have different people volunteering to lend a hand brewing, to see the process and get involved.

This was great for me as people (inexplicably) love the idea of digging 300kg of spent grain out of a mash tun.

Inevitably people would soon realise that brewing beer in a brewery is not the same as a piss up in a brewery and only a few would come back more than a couple of times. Unless it was just my conversational skills the excitement of volunteering at a brewery seems to run thin pretty quickly.

The Process Of Brewing Is Exactly The Same Despite The Scale

The brewery I was brewing on was relatively small. We had open vessels and things were done manually so the process of brewing 500 litres was the same as what I had done at home making 20 litres.

We of course had equipment that made things more efficient but in general you are really just using bigger vessels so the process of brewing was exactly the same. Everything is just a bit beefier and a lot more demanding.

Things In The Brewery Constantly Break Or Need Maintenance

When there is more at stake than just a few litres of beer in your kitchen then you need things to run smoothly. In reality, things can and often do stop working without warning.

The brewery was in constant use, the strain on equipment is a lot more than any home brewery. Pumps would stop working, need stripping down and parts replacing and there are a lot of pumps in a commercial brewery. There are pumps in the brewery itself but also in the cask washer, cleaning systems, cooling units.

We had problems with the electricity supply on the industrial estate the brewery was located. Power cuts would reset control units, switches would blow and stop working and all of these things could stop a beer being brewed or affect one that was fermenting under controlled temperature.

I went through more hose spray guns than I could count.

If You Haven’t Got Hop Contracts Don’t Count On Any One Variety

As a commercial brewery you want to have a contract for any hops you want to use in a beer. A contract would mean we had an allocated amount of that hop every year. You can work out how much you think you’ll need for the year and ensure your supply for that recipe.

I would often brew a one off, hop forward beer. It would go down great and there would be demand for future brews because people liked it. We would try to get hold of more hops and there were none to be found anywhere or at a price that would make the beer too expensive to reasonably sell. You learn quickly what is going to be a one off beer and what you can reliably brew year round by the ingredients you can source in a competitive market.

Making Beer Is One Thing, Selling It Is Another

95% of our beer was cask beer and selling cask beer is not easy. We were lucky, from very early on the owner had secured regular customers that would buy beer every week.

I was very happy making beer but I was extremely happy I didn’t have to sell it. That part of the business was foreign to me and it would be one of the reasons why I would not want to run my own brewery. To have any chance of success you have to be able to run a business and sell first and foremost.

It Is Incredibly Rewarding For Strangers To Buy Your Beer And Say They Love It!

It is one thing giving your homebrew to friends and family and getting their feedback. It is another for a stranger to part with their money and keep going back because they like your beer. This makes the experience of being a professional brewer totally worthwhile.

This List Could Go On and On

In the end my time as a professional brewer came to an end. My life took priority when my son came along and it was more viable for my wife to work as she was paid more than me (another lesson to learn if you want to go pro).

I look at my time as a brewer as a truly great experience and it makes me appreciate the art and craft a lot more. I do still prefer home brewing as a hobby and having the freedom to make whatever I want without it having to be a viable product.

I have gone back to brewing a lot more often in my free time and have even scaled down my batches to just 10 litres at I time. You could say that after brewing over 100,000 pints a year I appreciate brewing at a much smaller scale.

I have lots of stories and plenty of different experiences of brewing commercially now. If you have any questions or want to know something about brewing professionally drop a comment below and I will get back to you.