Briess Malting

For class today, we drove up to Chilton, Wisconsin to get a tour of the Briess malting facility. Unfortunately they would not allow us to take any pictures during the tour, so this post will be short because it is difficult to describe everything without some pictures. The tour was really cool, especially since the building is over 100 years old and they still use a lot of old equipment. Which does make me wonder about the whole "no pictures" thing, I understand protecting your businesses proprietary information, but there wasn't any new earth-shattering technology being used. I mean, some of the grain bins were made out of a bunch of stacked 2 x 6's. Since I have no pictures, you can just trust me that it was pretty sweet. At one point in the day I felt like a cow or something because I had eaten so much barley. Strange as this may sound, some of the specialty malted barley is actually pretty tasty. Besides that, the thing that stuck out most in my mind, keystone light for 35 cents in the break room vending machine, no joke.

Early Thoughts

I am two days into brewing school and I wanted to write down my initial impressions. First, there is no doubt in my mind that coming to the Siebel Institute was the right thing to do. I mean how could it not, look at the lunchroom:

Yes, there are kegs attached to those taps.

Don't get the wrong idea though, there is a lot more that goes on than drinking (the beers are free though). Besides, we can only drink at lunch and after class. I also must mention, that free beer with lunch seems like a great idea until about 30 minutes into the afternoon session. If you don't know, there are 4 hours of instruction in the afternoon, I drank more coffee to stay awake during the afternoon than I did the morning.

Like I mentioned earlier, this isn't just about drinking beer. There is a good 7 hours of instruction a day and it isn't all easy stuff. For example, we went over the bio-chemistry of the malting process of barley today. Lets just say, there is a reason you wouldn't find me in a bio-chem class at UW. The course is definitely going into the detail that I expected, which again reaffirms my decision to come here.

I will try to post as many things as I can throughout the next 6 weeks, I just want to be sure not to get distracted from real studying (yes, I have already spent time studying outside of class). If a post is either funny or makes little sense, that is probably a result of blogging while "researching"