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Commercial Co-Star: Pro-Am Brewing

Scoring a pro-am brewing session is like becoming the brewery’s guest artist in residence. Here's how to do it right.

Jester Goldman Oct 20, 2017 - 5 min read

Commercial Co-Star: Pro-Am Brewing Primary Image

Read part one of Jester's guide to going Pro-Am here.

Scoring a pro-am brewing session is like becoming the brewery’s guest artist in residence. They’ve selected your beer, and now it’s time to reincarnate your recipe in bulk form. In many cases, you’ll be invited to sit in on the brewing process, which is like a hands-on custom tour: overseeing the mash-in, contributing some muscle to stir the grist, tossing in the hops. They’re the same steps you do at home, but the scale is larger and the logistics are usually a little less casual.

It makes for a fun day, but you’ll enjoy it more if you mind your manners and have the right expectations going into it.

Brewery Behavior

Even if you’re good friends with the brewers, remember that you’re a guest in their place of business. Don’t assume you know everything; instead, always ask before you touch the gear. The equipment is bigger than you have at home, and the safety issues are similarly scaled up. Caustic cleaners, steam, and hot metal can cause serious injuries.

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Be respectful of the hardware and the brewery’s process. Just like you’ve developed your own optimizations, they’ve worked out how to safely and efficiently crank out a batch. It’s good to ask questions if something doesn’t make sense or if they don’t take an obvious shortcut. You might even get some ideas that you can apply at home.

Speaking of safety, if you do drink, be sure to indulge responsibly. Most breweries don’t treat each day as a big party, but with a special guest, they may be more inclined to offer samples during the slower parts of the brewing. By all means, enjoy yourself, but if you overdo it, you’ll likely be benched or ejected for everyone’s safety

Bring a Positive Attitude

With all the build-up, it’s easy to forget that a pro-am is a partnership, not a laboratory-controlled cloning experiment. If you go into it thinking the brewery can magically capture every nuance of your beer, you’ll be disappointed. It takes a lot of work and practice to replicate your recipes at home. Changing scale, equipment, and process details inject a lot of variability into the mix.

Many pro-brewers started out brewing at home, which gives them some experience in resizing recipes. With a little bit of math, they know their system well enough to come pretty close to hitting your starting gravity and targeted bitterness. But small variables at five gallons get much bigger at 10 barrels. This is not an issue with their process control; rather, it’s a question of the metrics that you provide. If your volumes and temperatures are not calibrated and accurate, your written recipe is more of a sketch than a blueprint.

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It’s also common to compromise your original recipe with substitutions. The brewery may not have that special hop or quirky grain you found at the local shop. Another challenge is if your beer relies on non-standard ingredients, like fruit or spices, in part because those can vary a lot by source or batch, but also because they may not work well with the brewery’s system. Years ago, I partnered with a small brewery that loved my ginger kriek beer.

Unfortunately, they were not equipped to handle real fruit or fresh ginger. Once I discovered that, I knew the collaboration would have little in common with my homebrew, beyond the idea of pairing ginger and cherries. Does that ruin the whole experience? It shouldn’t.

Whether it’s that obvious in the moment or not, you have to understand the basic truth: everybody will act in good faith, but the pro-am beer will be its own thing. You need to be flexible. Rather than getting frustrated because it misses the mark, you’ll be much happier if you can embrace the differences.

It’s best to stay focused on the positives: your award-winning beer earned the respect of a commercial brewery, you’ll have the rock-star-camp experience of being a pro-brewer for a day, and your collaboration will be on tap for everyone to try.

Life is good.

Above Photo © Brewers Association

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