THE MAGAZINE OF THE OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

SPRING 2014 OREGON STATER

OSU ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

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C A M PA I G N AT B I L L I O N — 9 M O R E T H A N S W E AT E R S — 1 8 B R E W I N G S U C C E S S — 3 0 R I L E Y ’ S A S S E S S M E N T — 5 2

A well-crafted brew of science & passion

Fermentation alums land jobs across the nation

Mighty fine brew(ers)OSU-trained beer experts are a hot commodity in a booming industry

By Kevin Miller

In the hallway outside Tom Shellham-mer’s office in Wiegand Hall, clues abound that being a “beer major” at

Oregon State might be a little tougher than it sounds.

The posters on the walls bear no resemblance to the imagery typically associated with promoting frothy alcoholic beverages.

Instead of bikini- and boardshorts-clad

young people watching a sunset on a beach, there’s “Iron chelating properties and hydroxyl scavenging activities of hop acids.”

Instead of an ice climber digging a chilled bottle out of a glacier so he can magically pop out of a cooler and deliver a cold one to a tailgater, there’s “Foam Stabilizing Effects and Cling Formation Patterns of Iso-alpha-acids and Reduced Iso-alpha-acids in Lager Beer.”

And instead of an affable brewery owner inviting thrilled tourists to sample

his latest brew, there’s the ever-popular “Impact of processing and hopping regimes on pro-oxidant metal content of pale lager beer.”

Shellhammer, professor of food science & technology, presides over a fermentation science program whose graduates are prized by beer makers large

Students Alex Jones and Rachel Hotchko, a graduate research assistant, test beer for bitterness. (Photos by Hannah O’Leary)

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and small — in Oregon’s booming craft brewing industry and across the nation and overseas.

They get snapped up because Shellhammer and his colleagues make sure their passion for making the perfect brew is backed up by a grounding in basic science and a knack for problem-solving.

“Brewing is very much an applied science,” he said. “Pretty much all of food science is. It’s chemistry, microbiology, biochemistry, engineering, all these things, applied to foods. So when you go into the grocery store, the process that converted the raw materials into breakfast cereal, fluid milk, yogurt, anything there ... that’s all food science.

“The aisle of the grocery store that I work in is the beer aisle. Other people here work on the wine aisle, the cheese aisle and so on,” he said.

Educated at the University of California, Davis, — where he earned all three of his degrees — Shellhammer holds an endowed position as OSU’s Nor’Wester Professor of Fermentation Science. An internationally recognized expert in hops chemistry, he has taught brewing science at the Technical University of Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and is on the board of examiners for the Institute of Brewing & Distilling in London.

His graduates speak with gratitude and admiration of how much they love their jobs, and about how superbly Shellhammer and his colleagues prepared them for success.

Annette Fritsch was one of Shellhammer’s first graduate students. She earned her master’s in 2007 and is in charge of research and development and sensory science for The Boston Beer Company, brewer of Samuel Adams and the largest craft brewer in the U.S.

She attributes much of her and the OSU program’s success to Shellhammer’s insistence that students run a gauntlet of preparatory traditional science courses, and that they also focus on sensory science so they understand how consumers experience a product.

She noted that, especially when working on a new beer, she and her colleagues must often make tiny adjustments in the ingredients and processes to achieve the right mouth feel of the beer (how thick or thin it feels on the tongue) or the correct haze (how clear or opaque it is) and myriad other factors in addition to its signature taste.

Then, once they get it right in small test batches, they have to figure out how to scale up the production to much larger amounts without losing the character of the beer, and to present it — unchanged in character — in various packages.

Professor Tom Shellhammer and student Victoria Chaplin measure carbon dioxide and other gases in packaged beer.

“When I went out into the industry I really felt prepared for the more practical work, and not just the science,” Fritsch said during a campus visit to represent Boston Beer at an OSU food science career fair. The company looks for prospective brewers and brewery scientists who are passionate about making

great beer and about being proficient scientists, she said.“We tend to hire perfectionists,” she said. “We’re passionate nerds. We’re very nerdy.

“People who want to be in brewing tend to be really excited about it. If you don’t have that, you won’t survive very long. You

have to really love the business, and love science, to do it.“You go to a conference and it’s very relaxed and you’re there

with your competitors and you’re all in your sweatshirts. But the science is very strict and very real.”

Shellhammer said some prospective majors are shocked when they see the list of required courses.

“That is an issue,” he said with a laugh. “We have people who come to the department and say, ‘I love beer. I love wine. How hard can it be?’”

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Pretty hard, it turns out.“Then they realize, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta

take chemistry. I’ve gotta take physics,” Shellhammer said.

“We do taste the product as we learn to make it, but no, we don’t have a beer tasting major. Our students who are interested in becoming brewers have a four-year degree that’s heavy in chemistry — they basically have a minor in chemistry.”

The 400- and 500-level classes Shellhammer and others teach, in which students finally get to focus on making beer, typically don’t even start until senior year.

“It’s hard,” recalled Eryn Bottens, a 2013 alumnus who works for Fritsch at Boston Beer, as he thought back to all those early science courses. “It’s almost like they’re dangling the carrot in front of the donkey to try to get you to finish the degree. You don’t realize it when you’re stuck in those classes, but you need all that stuff when you get out in the world.”

Bottens is assistant brewer in the

company’s research and development operation. He mainly runs what’s called a “nano-brewery,” producing 20-gallon batches of new beers that are being tested.

“When they come up with new beer ideas, I formulate recipes and brew them, and we tweak it as we go,” he said. “It usually takes a couple of tries to get it right.”

Bottens first came to OSU at 18, took pre-physical therapy classes and soon left to work as a machinist for five years. As the economy turned sour and he realized his job was going to go away, he spent time thinking about the next chapter of his life.

He’d made some of his own beer at home, and when he investigated the fermentation science program, he found a match.

“I always really liked science, and I liked working with my hands and making things,” he said. “Brewing is that perfect mix of art and science for me.

“You get to go out on the floor and drag

your hoses around, and do some of the physical stuff, and then when you create a product, you get to see the looks on peoples’ faces when they drink it and like it. That’s the best feeling.”

His job presents plenty of opportunities to use pretty much everything he learned at OSU.

Shellhammer is known to call his students “yeast ranchers,” because, in the end, it’s yeasts fermenting the other ingredients — basically hops and malted barley — that creates the alcohol and the nuanced flavors of a great beer.

Bottens finds it amusing that his duties at Boston Beer and indeed, his entire industry, are totally reliant on the tiny fungi.

“A lot of what I do has to do with yeast handling — what yeast does and how it performs in various conditions,” he said. “That’s something that extends back into those classes in microbiology and biochemistry.

“Just figuring out how to keep those yeasts happy in your beer is so

Dude walking through Boston on his way to work

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important.” he said. “They can’t talk, so you do have to figure it out. You have to look for signs and interpret what’s going on in there, so you can help them out and they can make the beer you want them to make.

“You’re completely at the mercy of the yeasts. If you can’t get your beer to ferment, you don’t have beer. If you don’t know the science behind it, you don’t have the tools to create consistently good beer.”

It’s not hard to figure out why there are so many jobs for newly trained brewers.

According to numbers released last month by the Brewers Association, there were 2,822 breweries in the U.S. in 2013, up 15 percent in a single year. Only 54 of them were traditional large breweries, meaning the craft industry accounted for 98 percent of all breweries in the U.S.

Overall, sales of beer in the U.S. have been flat or in decline for many years, but craft beer sales have steadily climbed. In 2013 they rose 18 percent in volume and 20 percent in dollar sales.

Oregon’s reputation as a hub of craft brewing both contributes to and benefits from the OSU program’s success. As breweries of all sizes continue to thrive across the state, it’s a rare one that doesn’t employ at least one Beaver.

Cal-Davis, Shellhammer’s alma mater, has long been an international leader in fermentation science, with a wine program that dates back to Prohibition, and a beer program that started in the 1950s and 1960s. OSU’s program started in 1996, and, Shellhammer said, is generally

considered to be second only to the Davis among U.S. programs.

“Prior to OSU being on the map, Davis was pretty much the only place in the nation with a four-year beer brewing program,” he said.

Similar programs are springing up around the nation, but OSU’s has the reputation and structure to remain a leader, Shellhammer said.

“The distinction at OSU is that all of our students are getting a solid degree in food science, with three options: traditional food science, fermentation science — meant for people interested in beer or wine — and then we have an enology or viticulture option, which is for students who really know they want to be winemakers.”

OSU could soon offer a fourth option in distilled spirits, having secured the money to recruit and hire a professor with that expertise.

“Cheese, wine, beer, bread — the teaching we do around here has a lot to do with the fundamental chemistry of how they’re made,” Shellhammer said. “The microbiology, the engineering, the sensory perceptions, the packaging — all these things apply.”

Shellhammer’s graduate students are trained quite specifically to be able to research and solve complex problems for their employers.

Below left: Jeff Clawson, ’88, ’94, manager of OSU’s pilot brewery, shows students how the bot-tling line works. Above: Student Nick Hergert, Shellhammer, student Chris Meinke and Clawson do a “rub-and-sniff” evaluation of some hops. (Photos by Hannah O’Leary)

Graduate student Nathan Froehlich does a sensory evaluation of some beer.

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In their own words

“Early in my time in the OSU program, I was able to get a job working in the OSU pilot brewery where we brewed research beers using experimental hops that were later shipped all over the world. We developed a recipe I still use a slightly modified version of today. I owe much of my success to the hands-on approach and wonderful professors in my department.”

“The classes I took really helped me have a great understanding of the brewing process as well as a general knowledge of food science. The knowledge needed to troubleshoot problems in the brewhouse, cellar or lab that I learned at OSU helped me hit the ground running from my first day working at Deschutes and every day since for the last eight years.”

“Oregon State’s hands-on program allows students to be involved in every aspect of the process — from brewing it, to analyzing it in the lab, to performing sensory analysis on it (my personal favorite). My professors prepared me for my career and helped me secure a job at Anheuser Busch. I use the knowledge I gained from my time at OSU every day.”

Eli Dickison, ’13Barley Brown’sBrewpub,Baker City, Ore.

McKennaHowden, ’11Anheuser Busch,Fairfield, Calif.

Eric Moore, ’06DeschutesBrewery,Bend, Ore.

“An example of a problem one of our brewing scientists might face would be that there’s this really strong interest now in hoppy beers — IPAs,” he said. “So her group of technical people will be responsible for developing new products in that area. She would need to assure the quality and consistency of the product.

“Also, a lot of craft brewers are looking more at canning their product because a lot of consumers are interested in buying it in cans, so she and her group might have to work out how to package it in cans without affecting the flavor.”

Some breweries pasteurize their beer, but some don’t. “The whole business of making beer in one place and shipping

it to all these other places and making sure it doesn’t go bad is complicated,” Shellhammer said. Adding to the complexity are the many different regulations in effect in places where the beer might be sold.

Meanwhile, with its success, the craft beer industry is growing a new generation of beer drinkers who are much more interested in nuanced differences in character and are always looking for a new beer to taste.

“Beer consumers used to be brand-loyal,” he said. “It was kind of like Chevy’s and Fords. You drank one brand of beer or drank the other, and that was it — one or the other.

“But consumers today have these portfolios or quivers of beers that they like, and they’re always changing them,” he said.

Given the highly competitive nature of the beer industry and the increasing need to present something new to try, Shellhammer doesn’t think the need for highly motivated brewers with great science credentials will go away anytime soon.

And that should provide incentive for the next batch of prospective “beer majors” to work their way through that daunting list of course requirements. q

OSU alumni Eryn Bottens, left, and Annette Fritsch represent The Boston Beer Company as they talk to graduate student Sophia Feng at a job fair in Wiegand Hall at OSU. (Photo by Hannah O’Leary)

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