How long have you been a professional brewer?
A long time. I’m not actually brewing now, but I was a professional brewer for 19 years, and I’ve been in the beer industry for the last two.
What are you doing now?
Starting about a year ago, I’ve been working in beer retail at Belmont Station [Portland, OR]. I’d call it the top bottle shop on the West Coast, with about 1,200 different beers It’s like a grocery store of beer, with walls lined with coolers and shelves in the middle. It’s a good transition into…whatever the next big phase of my career is going to be. It’s been really educational: since I’ve been judging forever, I know all about beer styles and I’ve tasted examples from all over the world. However, I didn’t have any brand recognition. Now I do. I can associate the flavors in my mouth with the label on the bottle.
With 19 years of brewing under your belt, what are you best at?
I’m really good at problem-solving. I can do it over the phone. With my brewpubs [Steelhead], there were five with similar enough equipment—J.B. Northwest—and I taught procedures for the brewers to follow. If they called me with a flavor problem, I could trouble-shoot by phone.
I’m good at developing systems. My background at the university was called Management Information Systems: it was a comprehensive business major with a computer emphasis. We took classes like systems design, and we’d load up flow charts and gantt charts—all these project management-type things. That was really handy as I worked with Steelhead [Brewing Co., in California and Oregon]. I took what I’d learned at Triple Rock [Berkeley, CA] and systematized it. As Steelhead opened more breweries, we had procedures in place, If you followed the procedures, you’d have a consistent beer, no matter who was brewing it, which was very important.
One time, one of my brewers called with a problem. Nothing I could think of would make the flavor he described. Finally, I asked, “Did you change this procedure?” It turned out he’d modified everything because he thought it was more efficient. Nawwww! I told him, if we were starting a new brewery right now, that is probably how we’d do it, but this is the way the first one did it, and now we have five of them. If one changes the procedures, they all have to, because the beer has to be consistent.
Asking the right question gets you half way there sometimes.
I’ve worn so many hats. I trained the brewers for the five locations, and they could call me with questions, but, being someone who wants all her children to be independent, the first thing I thought of was they need on-site references they can check before they call Mom. So, I became a technical writer and wrote operations manuals for all aspects of the brewery—quality control, lab procedures, OSHA, personnel management.
