Almost a Month Along

The lectures of the last few days have been more informative and practical than much of the material we've gone through so far at Siebel. After learning everything I've ever wanted to learn about yeast last week, we've moved on to the maturation and conditioning of beer into a finished product. While some of the information is geared more toward a macrobrew audience, it was great to explore some common problems concerning finished beer and the solutions needed to prevent them. The main message that's been hammered home is that oxidation at any stage of the brewing and fermenting process ruins beer flavor and shortens a beer's shelf life. While the yeast needs oxygen to replicate itself three times over to ferment the beer, it only needs 8-9 parts per million of dissolved oxygen, meaning that adding too much is just not that smart in the long run.
Another thing I've learned is that the old English system of measurement is much more difficult to deal with than the metric system, and If I were buying brewing equipment I would seriously consider hectoliters over barrels due to the ease of mathematical conversion factors if nothing else. From mixing up a cleaning solution to calculating the amount of yeast cells needed in fermentation, it just makes no sense to deal in barrels in gallons when the whole rest of the world has an easier way to do it.
I've got another test tomorrow morning, and a field trip on Saturday to Saugatuck Brewing Company in Michigan and Three Floyds Brewing Company in Indiana. I expect the same rowdy bus atmosphere, and hopefully I can take some more pictures along the way. It seems like I haven't been in Chicago that long, but it's been almost a month, and I'm not homesick yet.