Why I Left Brewing
Truthfully.
I loved brewing
I loved the pressure of a four-turn brew day, the active troubleshooting when the pump decided to stop working or the kettle flame was having a straight-up temper tantrum.
I loved the choreography of cellar work - the way tasks needed to layer over one another and the constant puzzle of the cellar schedule. Which hoses were free? Who would be using what pumps - how could we work the most efficient way possible?
I loved the smell of dry hopping and the pure joy of pulling a yeast and trub plug that looked exactly like a turd.
I loved cleaning. Scrubbing the floors, rinsing down the kit, knowing the day was done. The tasks that needed to be done were physically done and tomorrow, there’d be new ones.
Those things mattered - not just in some abstract sense, but in a real, measurable, tangible way.
I miss the sense of urgency with real world consequences.
On the lighter side, missing a dry hop meant the beer might not be true to target. If your DO levels were too high, it’s shelf life is shortened, oxidation will creep in, and off-flavours would start to show up.
And on the more serious side- if you didn’t clean a tank correctly, it could implode. If you didn’t pay attention to safety precautions, chemicals could end up in your eyes, or you could end up with third degree burns. An empty whiskey barrel was dropped on my foot, hitting just past my steel caps and broke two bones - it took 6 months to get clearance to be on the floor again. But that was lucky - there have been more serious injuries in brewing, and people have died.
Want to know more? Just peruse this R/Brewery thread or this Good Beer Hunting Article
That being said - brewing beer truly is a perfect balance of engineering and science, creativity, active problem solving - and at the end of the day, you get to sit down with a tasty AF pint and literally taste what you did it all for.
Enough waxing poetic about it - why did I stop?
Independent beer, heck, any beer, is a fragile industry right now.
And I mean that for the people actually making the beer - there’s no clear path forward .
Many of my friends feel stuck. There’s nowhere to grow. Wages are NOT keeping up. Breweries are closing left and right. Sure, it’s an industry built on passion and dreams, but there at least used to be pathways: start on the packaging line, move to cellar work, move to brewer, then maybe someone scouts you to be the head brewer of a new brewery or you start your own … that was the way at one point. But now, people in senior roles in breweries aren’t really leaving - because there’s no where to go.
For me, I knew I didn’t want to be a head brewer managing a big team - I liked brewing, not running a giant factory brewery. I had zero desire to move to a massive production brewery - I like the flexibility of small batches, and the creative freedoms they allow.
The only move that made sense for me in beer was to go smaller - to a tiny little, family owned brewery where I could experiment and really own the brand and the product. But the reality, nowadays? There’s no money or stability in that.
And opening my own place? While that might have been the dream at one-point, the reality is:
I didn’t come from money.
I’m an ex-pat (hello, visa costs).
And I’d been living on a brewer’s wage for too long
Plus - who was going to [financially] back a millennial female with like… no monies of her own in opening her own brewery?
And on top of all of that - the industry isn’t changing in the big ways it needs to (IMO, in many ways it’s reverting a lot of changes that were happening) and the majority of breweries and production teams by and large, are a boys club. And I was exhausted by it.
So when an opportunity presented itself to shift into, quite honestly, an entry-level role in tech - I took it. Not because I stopped loving brewing. But because I couldn’t see a path that wouldn’t eventually lead to a wall.
I was stagnant and I knew I needed to take an opportunity to shift and see what else is out there, and see if I had any “applicable skills”. 1
And, bonus for me, stepping away from brewing didn’t mean leaving the beer world that I really do love.
If anything, stepping away has given me more valuable insight into the industry as a whole. I’ve gained a more cohesive picture of it - and now, I’m asking different questions:
How do we build better systems without making things unnecessarily complicated?
How do we adopt tech in a way that actually helps, instead of becoming another thing we ignore and expense that is incurred?
How do we make the industry more (holistically) sustainable - financially, professionally, and for the people who actually make the beer?
How do we apply our skills to other areas, when we decide that it’s time to jump ship?
How can we positively impact our little world, our community, in our little slice of time cut by the time-knife?
And I do want to emphasize, that despite it’s niggly bits, I love the beer industry, I really do.
I have made some of my best friends in beer - people who are passionate, dedicated, hardworking. People who just want to do their thing, share it with others and make a living.
And what I’m looking at now is how we- the people on the floor, on the canning line, the people going from bar to bar fighting for tap contracts, the passionate ones pursuing their Master Cicerones because they just love it SO much - how do we adapt, evolve, and future-proof this industry?
Oh my god. They made it through a second blog post.
Wow.
THIS IS MOMENTUM, KIDDOS.
If you wanna encourage me………
Turns out, I have way more than I thought, so that’s cool - but more on that later