Meet KPU: Martina Solano Bielen

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Martina Solano Bielen is a brewing lab instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University who specializes in brewing microbiology. 

Her studies have taken her all over the world. She has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Valencia in Spain, Bachelor of Applied Science at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and a Masters of Science at McGill University in Montreal. After completing her studies there, she went on to study brewing microbiology at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago and completed her brewing diploma from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling (IBD) in London, England. 

She loves Belgian-style beers made by Dageraad Brewing, and is also a fan of the Vienna Lager from Studio Brewing that recently opened in Burnaby. 

When did you join the KPU community and why? 

I joined in 2015, and the position I had applied for was brewing instructor. Back then, I had just finished my master’s in microbiology so I was very excited to be able to apply my knowledge in microbiology in varying sizes, such as by checking the performance of the yeast. 

I thought it was exciting to be able to apply that knowledge in brewing, and being able to teach that really motivated me. And doing it in an environment where everyone wants to learn, is passionate about learning, and wants to improve, that’s something that I really enjoy. I love learning and getting more knowledge. 

What is your favourite story of your time at KPU? 

The moments when you have made mistakes that you’ve learned from, and that’s a nice learning opportunity. 

One of these times that I made a mistake and learned from it was on a Pink Boots brew. Every year, we make collaborations with the other Pink Boots Society members. We started to host yearly close to International Women’s Day, a brew where people could come and collaborate to make a recipe and then brew it. 

In 2019, one of the final steps of the brew itself, of making the wort before it got fermented, was that I forgot to press a valve on the screen, which would allow the oxygen from the tank to get into the wort. 

It’s funny because the valve of the tank was open, the physical valve was open, but the third valve that had to be open from the digital screen was not. It was a long day. I forgot to open that valve, and oxygen in this case is critical to the growth of the yeast and the first stages of fermentation. Without oxygen, the yeast won’t grow and multiply and ferment our beer. I was panicking. 

Most of the people had already left when I realized. One of the instructors, Nancy More, was there and Emily Kokonas. In order to oxygenate, we started to take out some of the beer from the fermenter into sterile containers and started to shake it and pour it back on the top. We spent a whole hour trying to figure this out and do it properly. It was a bit of a mess, there was splashes and stuff on the floor. 

It was funny though because I was in such a panic mode, and then that was such a hilarious way to try and make up for this mistake. But it worked out, and it was delicious. 

What is something you’d like to say to people new to the community? 

I find that the Langley campus often seems kind of quiet, but there’s lots of opportunities to learn. 

KPU has a lot of workshops and activities for learning, like the Learning Centre. There’s also the Kwantlen Student Association, which offers the possibility of creating new student clubs, which I think is really good. I’m trying to lobby my students to start a brewing student club and once they create that, they can plan and organize activities. There’s a lot of opportunities to do activities. 

Then of course, at KPU there’s the beer sales on Fridays. Even if it might be quiet throughout the week, there’s a chance to come up between 1:00 pm and 6:00 pm to taste the beer that has been made by our students. There’s also the veggie sale. 

In Langley, there’s a lot of breweries around, so lots of cool places to hang out over beers with friends. Even if it looks quiet, there’s actually lots of cool things that you can do. 

What are you working on right now? 

This semester I’m currently doing the chemistry labs. I’m basically teaching students how to do the chemical analysis on a beer so that they can, in the future, use the skills to track the fermentation of the beer to see how well the beer is doing, to check the quality and be consistent. 

We are also doing the packaging class. So we’re teaching students how to correctly package beer and test the package product to make sure that it doesn’t get wooden spek. I’m also doing the brewing courses, where we are teaching students how to brew. 

We are also working with the Applied Genomics Centre department in Surrey, which is developing new varieties of hops. 

For brewing, we only use the cones in the female plants. When you pass by a hop farm, usually all of the plants are females. They don’t want any males because as soon as there’s a male the fields start to pollinate it and make new varieties of hops and you don’t want that, so you want to keep all your hops the same. 

But this department is doing the opposite. They’re grabbing male plants from one variety, and females from different varieties and mixing them together, and creating new varieties that are basically crossovers from different hop plants. How we’re becoming involved with this is that we’re getting those hops right here and using them to brew just to see how the hop does after it’s been put into beer and what the resulting product is. 

What is something you would like people to know about you? 

I’m just passionate about learning. I’m really a big fan of nature, plants, animals, and interacting with nature — I love hiking. I grew up in Spain, so very close to the sea. I still love going to the shore and trying to look at crabs and just discovering, exploring, and learning new things. Like observing what this crab will do or this plant, how they behave. 

I started to try to learn all the names of the plants in this park close to my place. I’ve also tried to learn the calls and pay more attention to when I hear a bird. Try and look what type a bird is so that I can try to learn more about what birds and what plants there are around here. My bucket list is to learn about mushrooms one day.