Two days before the flight to Munich...

I've had a busy last couple of weeks, finishing up the Packaging and Processing module last Friday. While we had styles tastings before of English and German beers in previous weeks, the Belgian tasting that we had last Monday was by far the highlight. Randy Mosher- the author of Radical Brewing and one of the world's true experts on beer styles- came in the classroom at the last hour of the day carrying boxes of Belgian beers and looking like some sort of beer Santa Claus with his white beard. While the seven beers we tasted were mostly the main representative of each style, the depth of background and information that he offered on each made the whole class happy to stay a half hour later and hardly use the dump buckets.
We learned about different packaging types, and were exposed to the possibility that high packaging costs may one day push most breweries toward using plastic PET bottles rather than glass or aluminum. While they may be cheaper, the oxygen that permeates through the plastic would give them a short shelf life.
After scoring a 96% on my last weekly test and finding out that my six test average was 90%, I'm happy that I was able to strike a balance between making this education worth my while and having fun in Chicago at the same time. On Friday we said goodbye to the four students that only were here for the first six weeks for the associate program, and we had a graduation party for them. That's the first time that it really hit home for me that my time in Chicago was drawing to a close, and I'm glad I was here long enough to get comfortable and meet lots of interesting brewers and instructors.
For Monday and Tuesday of this week, my half of the class did a profitability workshop that was a business simulation where each team's brewery competed against the others for financial supremacy. Because most of the six teams were overly aggressive in investment in the first round, everyone ended up near bankruptcy and it took us three rounds to get back towards a positive retained earnings. My team ended up gravitating toward the draft market that others had abandoned for cans or bottles, and we ended up in third place overall by the end of the second day. The fact that five of the six teams finished in the red shows that brewers should probably stick to brewing and let someone else take the fall for bad business decisions.
For today and tomorrow, our half of the class switched to group research projects that we'll present to the entire class in a ten to fifteen minute power point presentation on Friday morning. My group of four is supposed to weigh the benefits of mash filters versus lauter tuns, and decide if a 650 hl brewery is best served by one or the other. For my part of the presentation, I'll be attempting to show how the flavor of a beer would be significantly different when using the same basic recipe on a mash filter over a lauter tun. I'll be schooled-out
after seven weeks of classroom activities and ready for a beer after that's over for sure.
What I'm really looking forward to is moving on to Munich on our Saturday flight. Three weeks of brewing on the Doemens Academy system will be a great compliment to all of the information that's been thrown our way recently, and I'm looking forward to the transnational study tour for the last two weeks as is everyone in the class. I've had a big enough dose of Chicago to be ready for something different, but I'll probably have something else to say before I leave.