Brewing Students Keep Something Special on Tap

Trying to stay sober at a university beer tasting

The horticulture tent at the KPU Langley farmer’s market on July 15 featured little boxes teeming with colourful KPU produce, but finding people who truly cared was difficult because a tapped cooler of free beer was under the same tent.

It’s not just any beer, either. This is beer crafted by science and the horticulture faculty in the new brewing facility on Langley campus.

The ad hoc bartenders from the department poured their brews into generous mini cups far deeper than any petri dish found in the biology lab. Two varieties were served: an ale and a lager. Few thirsts remained unquenched.

“I’m not a beer drinker so, they sort of all taste the same to me,” laughs Elizabeth Worobec, Dean of Science and Horticulture. She says she’s more of a wine person.

“I am. The faculty would shriek, but they know that…”

The brewery program just saw their premiere batch of students through first year, and now, Worobec says the next hurdle is fitting the following group in with the newly brewed second-years. The facility isn’t gigantic, after all, so the department had to be creative with timetabling.

The new brewing facility on Langley campus is a humble, humid, hoppy-smelling space lined with sophisticated chrome tanks, row upon row. Some were the size of soup pots, others were taller than you could see over. Worobec says their grand opening is scheduled for mid-September.

Bustling, goggled students waved hello when horticulture faculty member Michele Molnar gave a tour of the facilities.

“A lot of the students we have right now are homebrewers, so they’re familiar with this sort of equipment,” says Molnar. “But with coming to the program, they’re able to hone their skills and understand why things happened the way that they did because they understand the science of it.”

Students will really have to get it right by next year, when instead of faculty-produced beers featured at the farmers market, it’ll be their signature brews on tap.

“Most of them have their head in the stars,” says Worobec. “They just can’t wait to have their own beers that they can call their own.”

The school of business is also at the bar, during the first fermentations of this program. Worobec says the department is currently working with a business instructor who wants to—as a student project—have students do marketing for student beers.

“In the first term it’ll be the business students sort of coming up with the global plan, and the second term it’ll be the senior [brewing] students with their own internal plans,” says Worobec.

“And hopefully they will work with the business students and come up with something.”

Brewing students in their first term would have to do a marketing and promotion course too, for the sake of learning the business of beer. And in this specific province, the business is obviously booming. The scene is prolific enough these days that, for one, CBC Radio Vancouver often has a beer columnist show up to talk about new beer trends. Last time, apparently “sours” were in, a special type of beer that is intentionally acidic. It’s a good time to be a brewmaster in British Columbia.

KPU does plan on selling their own beers, but Worobec says they firstly teach “the business of selling beer.”

Even if the university decided to quit school to become an evil beer monolith, with grimacing Alan Davises on every cap, their facility is plenty smaller than your average microbrew—which if you look at it in this context, probably isn’t that micro after all. KPU could never produce at a competitive rate like its neighbours. In fact, Worobec says some of those neighbours comprise an advisory committee for the program.

And it’s probably for the best. How else would they steal the golden lager recipe?