This was the week that taught me two very valuable lessons: 1) I was being exceeding optimistic when I thought I could juggle school, relationships and 4 part time jobs; and 2) (related) I am nowhere near as good at multi-tasking as I think I am. Too much paying work to do assignments properly, and what free time remains is spent on schoolwork rather than on spending time with Keith or friends. I was beginning to resent work and school, and that is a slippery slope. I’ve decided to not work Saturdays anymore, and am rethinking my plan to work at the two Bulk Barns by giving up either the nights in St. Catharines or Sundays in Toronto. The money is nice, but not if it comes at the cost of losing focus on what is important. Keith & friends > school > work.
Day 27
Understandably, the last week is a bit blurry when looking back on it. Monday was Ingredients class, where we had another highly-detailed lecture on water. I have still not quite got the hang of being fully present at these early Monday morning classes.
Day 28
Tuesdays are my favourite days. That’s the day we spend in the brewery. My group was on the pilot system where we made a Belgian Wit. I asked many, many questions and took lots of pictures of bits of hardware like hoses and valves. Still feel like I’m flailing here – nothing about 1 gallon home brew prepared me for this.
We also had a visit from Deborah Newman, the Deputy Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, the government branch who funds Ontario colleges and universities. I was asked if I would meet with her when she came in, and of course agreed. A crowd of people in suits came in with her, and there was I in soggy tshirt (had a slight mishap with a hose, don’t ask) and dirty rubber boots. I gave her the five minute rundown on what we were doing and talked up the program. Apparently I did a good job of it, as both Jon Downing, the head brewmaster,and Dr. Dan Patterson, the president of college, came over to me afterward.
It was back to work after she left, and we finished the Wit, cleaned up, and sampled some of the Calabazas de la Muerte (Pumpkin of Death) kegged and bottled by the other group. I’m still on the fence over pumpkin beers; I won’t turn one down but I won’t go out of my way to find one. This one was good, but had a touch too much allspice and cloves for my tastes.

Day 31
I had a blog post assignment due for Communications, and spent the morning editing and recycling a piece I had done for the Prud’homme Specialist class on women in brewing. I finished just in time for Intro to Brewing class, where we watched YouTube videos on hop production until the guest speaker, Matt from Canada Malting arrived. He went though two presentations that while pretty technical, were very interesting and filled in a few blanks about the malting process.
He went a bit late, and so we had about a half hour to eat a late lunch before Sensory class. Here Ray brought in 18 samples of crushed malt. Using Bodum French presses, we made teas out of them and tasted the differences between them. The tasting that followed was related and we sampled 6 beers from a variety of styles to compare the malt profiles:
- Newcastle Brown
- Pilsner Urquell
- Kilkenny
- Ldn Porter
- Guinness
- Elemental
I was quite taken with the Elemental, a lovely porter from Renaissance Brewing in New Zealand with lots of chocolate and dark fruit notes.
Back around to Monday, Day 34
We had a guest speaker in, Mike Driscoll from Harvest Hop and Malt, who some of us had met before when we went out to his hop yard in Guelph. Before he arrived, Kevin handed out the tests on hops from a few weeks before and went over the questions. I didn’t do as well as I thought I did, with a mark of 71%. A few of my guesses were wrong (not surprisingly) and I had a few calculator errors thanks to that damed BA II Plus that I hate so much. Grrr. Just made me more determined to do better on the next one.
Alan came in with a couple of boxes – our work shirts were in! I always wanted a shirt with my name embroidered on it!

There was also an assignment due in Ingredients, a research report on a hop product. I made two serious errors here – I waited until close to the last minute to get started on this, and used up all of my Saturday time with Keith working on it. I also relied on technology to sync my work from my home desktop to the cloud where I could retrieve it and work on it on Sunday night once I got back to Grimsby after work. It wasn’t synced, and thankfully Kevin gave me an extension to the end of the day which meant a lot of time in the school library’s quiet room re-doing a lot of work. Yay. It wasn’t great by any means, but something was better than nothing, right?
Day 35
Brewery day. We donned our new shirts and headed in. This week my group was on the larger brew system that was doing a contract brew for Brothers Brewing. Since there’s just too many of us to work on it (it involves a fair bit of standing around and waiting), most of the group headed to other tasks. Apparently, they had nearly sold out of the First Draft lager and ale, so some of the guys bottled for most of the day. Keg washing also had to be done, so I volunteered for that as I hadn’t worked on that machine before. There were a few hiccups in the machinery near the end, but we were able to get all but 4 processed.
