Ringwood chronicles

[chazwicke]

There is an interesting blog that I've read and have a copy of that has now been taken down. It is about an unhappy brewer at a brewery we all can probably guess. It might serve as a warning to all those enthusiasts who want to turn professional and also might highlight that even though we all enjoy craft brew and think brewers are in it for love - that breweries are businesses and making money is their chief aim. I don't know if this is a true story or someones fictional account and an attempt to smear. I can't vouch for it's authenticity but found it interesting.



Why exactly I hate my job (part 1 of 3)
Long before I finished school and even began looking for brewing jobs I heard all the warnings about brewing. The hours are tough, you better like cleaning, the work is physical, the pay is terrible, etc. In this respect, the job is exactly what I expected.

I am scheduled to work 10.5 hour days, but that typically gets stretched to 11 or 12. I was told when I was hired that I would only work weekdays, but as soon as I was trained I got moved to Sundays. Three day weekends aren't very fun when they take place mostly during the week. Sunday happens to be a late morning for me, because I get to come in at 4 AM. Monday I am scheduled at 1. Last Sunday night I watched Game 7 of the ALCS, which ended at 11:55 PM, and then had to leave immediately to make the 1 hour drive to work. If the Sox happen to have the opportunity to clinch the World Series this Sunday night, I may have to call in sick for the first time. Tuesday and Wednesday I get a bit of a break again and come in at 3:30. So do the hours suck? Yes.

I can spend anywhere from half an hour to two and a half hours of a given day cleaning. The vast majority of the cleaning we do is scrubbing fermenters. Once a beer is racked out of a vessel someone must climb in with a scraper, some scrub pads and a bucket of acid and clean the entire interior. You begin by scraping the yeast ring off the upper rim and then scrub every surface with acid. We have six 50 bbl vessels, nine 100 bbl and five 300 bbl. A 300 bbl fermenter is a square roughly 12 ft x 12 ft x 12 ft. Cleaning one of these alone can easily take upwards of two hours. Although I'm not allowed to, I've begun bringing my iPod in with me to curb some of the boredom. I was caught with it the other day by the one guy who actually cares. He didn't give me a too hard of a time, and simply told me I can't listen to it while working. It hasn't stopped me, though. Anyway, that's mostly what we do for cleaning. After two hours of scrubbing your arms get pretty damn tired. The first day I had to clean one I thought my arms were going to fall off, but I've gotten used to it by now. One silver lining of the job is that my upper body is in the best shape of my life. It also takes a good bit of athleticism to climb around in fermenters all the time. This is really the most physical part of the job, far more than heavy lifting. I do a bit of that, but it's more the constant scrubbing, walking around on your feet for 12 hours a day, and running up and down stairs (the cold room is split between two floors) that wears you down over a week.

While this all sucks, the real physical challenge is the working conditions. I am constantly cold and wet. For the first few months I was getting myself sprayed with beer or water daily until I finally got the hang of remembering when I can or can't open valves, where to stand when doing certain things, not disconnecting lines under pressure and all sorts of other little bits of wisdom. I wear shin length boots to keep my feet dry. For a while this was not working, as I was still getting wet all the time and water was running right down my legs and pooling at my feet. I had a nasty case of athletes foot for a month or two. That has passed, but the boots have worn bald rings around my legs from all the abrasion. The front of each shin has a bright red scaly mark where the boots rub all day. Halfway through the day this rubbing gets too uncomfortable, so I roll my boots down a few inches. Now I have two bald rings and two red scaly sores on each shin. Cleaning chemicals frequently get spilled on my legs, which particularly burn when they hit the sores. My hands are even worse. About three weeks into the job the tips of my fingers began itching and peeling. It eventually spread all across my hands. The condition changes a bit from day to day, but they have never recovered and will not until I quit. Right now they are at least smooth and not peeling, but are hard and my fingers are actually permanently pruned. As soon as I go back to work Sunday and begin dipping my hands in iodophor constantly they will begin to peel all over again. I basically am missing about half the skin that belongs on my hands and fingers. This makes them extremely sensitive to heat, and cause me to bleed easily from shallow scrapes. It's probably a good thing I'm single right now because if I were a woman I wouldn't want to be touched with my sandpaper hands. I think the recovery of my hands is the first thing I am looking forward to when I do finally quit. I will try to post pictures if I can get some decent ones.

[chazwicke]

I do all of this for $11/hr. Even with the decent amount of overtime I log on a daily basis, that doesn't exactly add up to 110K annually. This is after my first raise. I made $10/hr the first four months. When I took the job I believed that these were all things I could tolerate because I was going to be brewing beer and that would be enough to make me happy.

In truth, if these were the only problems with my job I would be content. On the best days, I still believe this. I don't think I could do it forever, but I feel like I could tolerate all this shit as long as I am doing something I love. The problem is that this is simply not something I love.

Posted by Tom at 12:18 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Why exactly I hate my job (part 2 of 3)
As I said, I could tolerate the bad hours and the abuse on my hands if this was a job I loved, but it simply is not. There are two main reasons for this. One, brewing just doesn't satisfy what I want in a career. This I will explain in part 3.

The other reason is that I just don't buy into the system I have found myself a part of. I came to a craft brewery to make beer a product that I believed in. Many beer geek friends took jabs at the brewery I chose to work for (yes, I had other options) due to the negative reputation, but I just laughed it off. I honestly came here liking most of the beer we make. I thought that we made a quality, if sometimes inconsistent, product. I quickly learned that my dad was right: businesses are about making money first and product second. Our rushed brewing process is typical of the general attitude regarding the beer: crank it out, get it out the door and onto store shelves. Success is dictated by sales.

Thanks to our fall seasonal pumpkin beer, which is actually the same exact base beer as all of the other fruit beers we brew, the past few months have been absolutely dominated by brewing beer that everyone in the brewery hates. I would estimate that over 50% of the beer that has gone out the door since mid-July has been some incarnation of this artificially flavored wheat beer. We continue to hear stories about the pumpkin beer selling off the shelves and winning awards, and we continue to laugh. Who is drinking this stuff? we constantly wonder. While pumping out this garbage constantly, any criticism about the quality of our product is countered with "we're setting sales records, so we're obviously doing something right." For those who have wondered just how different it is to brew with real fruit versus extracts, the truth might be even more frightening than you ever imagined. We brew a bland wheat beer and then right before carbonation (after filtration) add a foul alcohol based extract syrup. At first I wondered why we wouldn't want to ferment out some of the sugars in the fruit extract, but it turns out there are none. I once got some extract on my finger and licked it off. For about 10 minutes I wanted to throw up, it was that disgusting. I had rated the blueberry beer we make prior to taking the job, but took my ratings down when I started work. I now understand why my impression was "an unpleasant flavor of rotten fruit."

Furthermore, any problems with a product are essentially ignored. A recent batch of a beer that we make under contract came out with flawed. We were detecting a phenolic off flavor. The response to the problem was to shrug our shoulders and send it out anyways. We got a high number of complaints about it from customers. Better luck next time I guess.

I am instructed not to filter a beer over 32 degrees, yet if I ever told someone that the beer wasn't ready to be packaged because I shut down the filter due to high temperatures I think I might be crucified. Lately we have had problems with a few beers not attenuating fast enough (as fast as we want them to). Since our racking and filtering schedule is set far in advance, this meant that beers were to be racked 12 hours after they finished attenuating and filtered 24 hours after that. Rather than alter the schedule for the sake of the beer, I was told to just go ahead with it. "It's going to be a bitch to filter," I said to my boss, the cold room supervisor. "They don't give a shit, it's on the schedule so it has to be done," he responded, speaking of the brewmaster and brewhouse manager, who had told him to go ahead with it.

We use corn syrup in one of our brews. When the alpha acid % changes with a new hop shipment we simply adjust all hop additions such that the same amount of alpha acids are being used, regardless of when that hop addition is and what hop we are using. In other words, say the recipes are written for Cascades at 5%AA, and the new shipment has 10%AA, we simply use twice as much Cascades in any given addition. Now where is the craft in that?

Yes, we sterile filter our beer, but only for aesthetics. We don't filter stouts because no one can see the difference. When we rack beer we add fining agents. We add alginex, XLC (which is a silica gel compound) and isinglass (the famous fish guts). We even add finings to our casks. I have tried to argue that this is completely counter to the entire concept of cask beer, but it falls on deaf ears.

We add "antifoam" to fermenting beers when the yeast head is about to spill over the top of the fermenter. I don't know exactly what it is, but I know it works by breaking polar bonds and causing the foam to break up and settle in the same way that soap breaks surface tension on water. Whatever that chemical is, do you really want it in your beer. We aren't allowed to use it on organic beers though, so there's another reason to go organic. And, I won't repeat my problems with the questionable fermentation practices. So, why bother with quality control when everything you do is designed to eliminate quality from your product in the first place?

Everything is geared towards getting the beer out the door. On a daily basis we are scheduled to filter and carbonate beer for it to be packaged immediately. In other words, if we have any delay at all, we are often holding up the packaging line. We have four 300 bbl conditioning tanks, but I can't remember the last time we actually filled one. We are always splitting up our 300 bbl brews into 3 or more 100 bbl tanks to make sure the beer is ready on time. It gets beer out a bit faster, but requires a lot more labor, eventually costing the brewery. We desperately need someone with some business sense to come in and actually analyze how much time and money we are losing doing things the way we do, but that will probably never happen. We are expecting to make around 75,000 bbls of beer this year, yet we do everything exactly the same way as when we were just starting out making 10,000 bbls.

Our facility can't even take it. Like I said, we aren't supposed to filter over 32 degrees, but our coolant system can hardly handle this. All through September it was constantly breaking down. Years ago legend has it that we could actually get filter temperatures around 28 degrees, but the lowest I have ever seen is 30. 31 or 32 is far more typical, though. Our brewery just wasn't designed to push out 75,000 bbls. Of course, we just pushed right through, getting that beer out the door.

Our carbonation system is incredibly hands on and error prone. We have been having untold troubles with getting our carbonations right and getting beer ready in time. Apparently, no one has ever thought to try to schedule things so we actually have some wiggle room in case anything does go wrong.

Then, you have the standard pitfall of any small business: bad management. On Sunday mornings the brewhouse manager works in the cold room with me. He is the guy that makes the schedule every week, deciding what day and time everyone will come in and posting it in the office. In other words, he schedules himself. Most of us have relatively fixed weekly schedules, but he moves himself around a bit. He tends to schedule himself at a different time each Sunday, yet never ever comes in at that time. This Sunday he was only 45 minutes late, by far his best performance since I've been working Sundays with him. 2 hours late is far more typical.
One weekend he was going to Vermont on Saturday and driving back to work Sunday morning. He conservatively scheduled himself at noon, hoping he could be back by then. By 2 PM he still wasn't in so someone called him and asked when he would be. He said he was stuck in traffic in Boston and would be there in two hours. Since you all know where I work, it should be easy to look at a map and see that Boston is not on the way here from Vermont. Not a single production employee would ever pull this kind of shit, but he doesn't even try to hide it. When he works he basically does the bare minimum and then bitches about how much he works and how much more we have to do.

[chazwicke]

The brewmaster only brews once or twice a week. One of his responsibilities is to make the production schedule, deciding what we will brew and when. There are frequently mistakes on the schedule, like a beer that is supposed to be racked, filtered and packaged that was never scheduled to be brewed. One day a cold room employee caught just one of these such mistakes. One type of beer was brewed, then the next week that same batch number was attributed to a different type of beer on the schedule, which was supposed to be bottled. This was caught two days before it was to be racked and three days before it was to be bottled and shipped out. This doesn't seem like a huge deal until you know that the beers are pre-sold, so the brewmaster had sold a beer that didn't exist. His response was to chew out the employee who caught the mistake and ask him why no one had caught it sooner. After a bit of a closer look we discovered that the brewmaster himself had brewed the beer in question; the one brew he did that week. If anyone in the brewery should have caught the mistake it was him, yet he blamed us for it...and the management wonders why no one takes accountability for mistakes and blames them on everyone else around them.

So yeah, maybe if I just worked at a different brewery I would be much happier. I just have no respect for how things are done here on virtually any level.

(part 3 coming tomorrow at the earliest)

Posted by Tom at 10:27 AM 0 comments

Questionable fermentation practices
I didn't want to leave anybody hanging with no updates for days after an introduction that promises so much. I should have mentioned that I work Sunday through Wednesday, at least 10.5 hours a day. That means, after my first post today, I won't normally update again until Sunday afternoon. But, since this is my first day, I thought I'd start giving an idea of what exactly I do.

By title I am a "brewer." However, I work in the cold room. I do cellaring, not wort production. The wort producers brew the beer, put it in a fermenter, pitch the yeast, and turn it over to us. We in the cold room take care of the beer from that point until it is taken to be bottled or kegged. So, the primary daily production tasks of a cold room employee are racking beer from the fermenter to a conditioning tank, and then filtering that beer. When I was hired I was told I would start in the cold room and learn wort production after a few months. I should begin training in wort production soon, but no one has given my any indication that it will actually happen in the near future.


The typical life cycle of a beer for us is three days of active fermentation. Once the beer achieves the desired finishing gravity on the third day the beer is chilled down to around 40-50 degrees and about half of the yeast head is skimmed off the top of the open fermentation vessel. We are able to use open fermentation because we use only one rather famous strain of yeast for every beer we brew. On the 6th day the beer is racked out of the fermentation vessel, and on the 7th day it is filtered, carbonated, and possibly packaged.

If that sounds way too fast to you, you're not wrong. Personally, I think that many of the problems often attributed to our yeast are actually due to this extremely rushed process. Rushed fermentation and cold crashing a beer immediately upon attenuation causes the yeast to drop out before they're really done all their work, particularly reabsorbing diacetyl produced during fermentation. Let me just say that if you know what diacetyl is, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about here, particularly with regards to our yeast and our brewery. Fuethermore, we actually put recirculation pumps in the beers to make them ferment even faster. Our yeast is particularly flocculent, so we use pumps to suck beer from the middle of the fermenter and spray it back on top, depositing some of that yeast that is dropping out back on top of the yeast head. How we don't have horrible problems with picking up airborne infections and serious oxidation is beyond me. I suppose we manage to avoid infection by having a brewery so dominated by our one yeast that nothing else has a chance to take hold. Regardless, this just seems to be a terrible and unnecessary idea, unless your priority is to crank as much mediocre beer out of the brewery as fast as you can with little regards to quality. I won't be all that surprised if someone tells me that this is actually a common practice, but it just is so counter to everything I've ever been told about good fermentation practices.

[chazwicke]

Also, temperature control is a huge issue. Our brewmaster (a name you may be familiar with) foes not trust technology. He has an extreme aversion to it, to quite a fault. Temperature control is a perfect example. We have no automated temperature control on our fermentation vessels. All we have is a few pipes that run around the perimeter of the vessel, carrying coolant through the beer much like a wort chiller. Each vessel has a set of valves, one in and one out, that we must open to cool down the beer. The cold room is kept around 60 degrees, but the thermal energy produced by fermentation causes the beer to heat up significantly if not constantly monitored. On a given day there are anywhere from 3-6 employees working in the cold room, but on the days I work I am solely responsible for fermentations. Part of this job is to pull a sample from each actively fermenting beer and check the temperature every few hours. Most of our beers must be fermented between 66-72 degrees. I have gotten quite good at maintaining and controlling the temperatures. However, as some strange relic of the company's past, I am required to "put the fermos to bed" every day before I go home. What this means is I am to cool the beers down to 66 or 67 degrees before going home so that they don't need to be checked until around midnight without any of them getting too hot. This used to be done because there was no one at the brewery overnight to check on the beers. These days we have someone there 24 hours, so there is no need for this practice, yet this is how it continues to be done. Sounds like an OK idea until you learn that some fermentations are so active that they can go from a perfect 66 to 74+ degrees in a twelve hour period. Also consider that on a daily basis it becomes extremely easy to leave the coolant flowing through a beer for too long cooling the beer down far too much. We fix this by running hot liquid through those same pipes, heating the beer back up. No, this is not good for the beer. I personally feel that lack of proper temperature control is a huge factor in the lack of consistency of our product. At times I have tasted differences in the flavor profiles of beers that were overheated or overcooled. All this could be averted if we simply put some thermostats on the fermenters, not to mention the labor saved, but our brewmaster refuses to do so.

Overall, this is the first major frustration of my job. We live in the dark ages. We brew beer with an intentional lack of technology. This not only makes our lives as employees more difficult, but more error prone and therefore more likely to be detrimental to the beer. Yet, we insist on filtering the beer. ..

Posted by Tom at 3:19 PM 0 comments

The truth is, my job sucks
For years I dreamed of working in the brewing industry. One day in the spring of my junior year in college, after a lot of deep thinking, I finally figured out what I wanted to so with my life. I was sitting in class, ignoring a lecture on US History, about what I do not recall because I was too deep in thought, when it finally all became clear to me. Making beer was the perfect career for me. It required both scientific knowledge and skill as well as creativity. I could make a product I was proud of. There were standards on which I could judge my own success. Was I making winning awards? Did my beer sell well? Did I like my product? As soon as the lecture ended I walked straight across campus to the library and began reading books on how to brew beer. I eventually got a homebrew kit and started crafting my own recipes. I even changed my major from history to chemical engineering to help secure the right job upon graduation. Eventually I gave up on engineering, as it was taking far too long to graduate, and instead decided to finish my history degree and get out there to begin learning on the job. Coincidentally, it was on the day that I finished my final term paper, thus completing my college coursework, that I got a call from a nationally known craft brewery offering me exactly the job I wanted: professional brewer. At least I thought it was the job I wanted.

Now, five months in, I want out. I am creating this blog for two reasons. One, to finally satisfactorally answer the questions I get when I tell people what I do for a living. "What exactly do you do?" "What's it like?" "Do you get to drink beer all day? " And, "Why do you hate it so much?" Two, I need a place to vent. I don't plan to be at it much longer, but until the day I finally do have the pleasure of quitting, I need some way purge all the frustration, stress and anger I manufacture over the course of a work week.

I probably would have started this sooner, but the fear that it would somehow get back to someone at work prevented me from doing so. Now, however, I wouldn't mind getting fired. I would like to leave on good terms when I do quit, but termination certainly isn't the worst thing that could happen to me. Anyone who reads this most likely was directed here by me personally, and therefore knows exactly what brewery I work for, but just to be safe, I will refrain from using any specific names or references, other than the title of the blog, which is a pretty good hint.

I work four days a week and will attempt to post at least something every day that I work, but I really can't promise anything at the moment. We will have to see how it plays out.

[steveh]

Lew had a discussion going on this over at his blog (http://lewbryson.blogspot.com/), but it looks like he may have re-thought the discussion...though he has a Ringwood poll up.

S.

[newportstorm]

'Tis gone now.
Guy is a member at RateBeer - posted in their OT forums, as well.
Why he thought his public (um....blogs on the web are public, right?) rantings would go unnoticed is beyond me.

And I don't get why he's worried about any Shipyard employees seeing it. He apparently hates the job, the product, the brewing methodology and the management. All that happy, happy, joy, joy for $11/hr? No thanks.

At least he'll have his days free to watch the World Series.

[Derekt2]

Originally posted by newportstorm
'Tis gone now.
Guy is a member at RateBeer - posted in their OT forums, as well.
Why he thought his public (um....blogs on the web are public, right?) rantings would go unnoticed is beyond me.

And I don't get why he's worried about any Shipyard employees seeing it. He apparently hates the job, the product, the brewing methodology and the management. All that happy, happy, joy, joy for $11/hr? No thanks.

At least he'll have his days free to watch the World Series.

Personally, I think that whole thing is garbage. There are a lot of inconsistencies in what he is writing, and I'm saying that from the perspective of a former (pro)brewer myself as well as someone with a critical eye. Just my .02.

[chazwicke]

Yeah I'm not sure if it was true or some attempt at a smear. However the guy did contact Lew Bryson and asked him to take it down from his blog until he had time to quit later this week. So Lew thinks it is true I guess. I thought it was an interesting perspective however, I am not willing to say I believe the whole story either. And if it is true - There are always two sides. So, I'm certain there would be a more balanced reality.

[M.K. Jeeves]

I would tell this guy welcome to the world, kiddo, and give him the "life isn't fair" speech. learn from this, update your resume' and get on with your life. A lot of pre-concieved notions are burst when you actually start getting into the nuts and bolts of making a product. I like to eat steak, but if I had to butcher the steer I'm sure my outlook would be different.

[Airborneguy]

Hpnestly sounds like any other job in the begginning... POSSIBLY he works for a bad company, but I definately wouldn't take that as a description of the industry as a whole...

On a side note, I was thinking about being one of the brewers from Sam Addams in the commercials for next year's Halloween... they look happy with their job no?

[Mill Rat]

Originally posted by M.K. Jeeves
I like to eat steak, but if I had to butcher the steer I'm sure my outlook would be different. IMO if you haven't killed, gutted, and butchered, and eaten a few critters you have no right to be an adult carnivore. There's something in seeing a living creature go from field to table that makes you a little more humble and respectful of nature than seeing a slab of red stuff between styrofoam and cellophane at the grocery. Kind of like the respect for a well-crafted beer that comes from having brewed beer yourself.

[Airborneguy]

Mill Rat, sounds like you have a fondness for what my tattoo represents...

[newportstorm]

Is it a skewed story? Of course.
Are their inaccuracies/inconsistencies? Yup.
Doesn't mean some of the decisions mentioned are not true, though I'm sure any brewery would like to spin it that way.

Aside from Old Thumper, Shipyard hasn't impressed me with many/any of their beers (Shipyard or contract brewed brand) in years.

As for Pumpkinhead taking up enormous amounts of the brewery's time and effort, despite it being a near-putrid beer.....I'd buy that for a dollar.

[newportstorm]

Grapevine whispered.....employee X and Shipyard have parted ways.

[darylM]

So shipyard makes crappy beer and is mismanaged. Any surprise there? I have been on a few failing projects and a few successful ones. There are so many little things that make it successful that its hard to control. However, mismanagement will always mess things up no matter how good everything else operates.
I would have to say if management grew a brain, the unknown employee may be still working there.

[newportstorm]

Originally posted by darylM
So shipyard makes crappy beer and is mismanaged. Any surprise there?

Nope.

Originally posted by darylM

I would have to say if management grew a brain, the unknown employee may be still working there.

Doubt it. On both counts.

Shipyard has grown rapidly - one of the 30 largest brewers in the country now. Little reason to change course.

And publicly (and not so anonymously) bashing your company, its methods and employees isn't the way to attempt change. Not that he wanted it.

[darylM]

Originally posted by newportstorm


Doubt it. On both counts.

Shipyard has grown rapidly - one of the 30 largest brewers in the country now. Little reason to change course.


If half of what that blog is true, Shipyard has forgotten what made them grow in the first place; the customer being satisfied with the product. I have observed that with a lot of successful buisnesses. So I agree, they won't change.

And publicly (and not so anonymously) bashing your company, its methods and employees isn't the way to attempt change. Not that he wanted it.

I never thought he wanted to change the buisness, just warn those that want to join.

[newportstorm]

From what I hear (and have read, verbatim), Shipyard says "the beer sells, so someone's buying it..."

Much of what was in that blog has been known (or assumed) for a while now. That brief insider's view simply confirmed a few things.

[darylM]

Originally posted by newportstorm
From what I hear (and have read, verbatim), Shipyard says "the beer sells, so someone's buying it..."

Much of what was in that blog has been known (or assumed) for a while now. That brief insider's view simply confirmed a few things.

That is so depressing I need a beer now(not Shipyard). Its one thing to be cynical, its really depressing when its confirmed.

[chazwicke]

I wonder what the beers are like at Federal Jacks. I used to always stop there for a few brews and a meal. Since it is a brewpub hopefully their beers have not declined.

[mkgrenwel]

The blog has returned. http://chroniclesofringwood.blogspot.com/

I'm wondering if those of you who mentioned "inconsistencies" could talk about what you perceive them to be?

[ambeer]

Hummmm....
Interesting story....