Aaron Allen, co-owner and head brewer of Seven Arrows Brewery in Augusta County, observes beer after it has passed through the sheet filtration system. (Photo courtesy Piedmont Virginia Community College)
The craft brewing industry has inspired a zeal for zymology — the science of using fermentation to produce food and libations — at Virginia colleges.
The growing popularity of craft brewing education is bolstered by economic viability. Virginia is a leader in craft brewing on the East Coast, with more than 230 breweries in 2018, according to the Brewer’s Association. Craft brewing had a $1.37 million economic impact in Virginia last year, with the production of 405,465 barrels of craft beer.
In a bid to grow the industry beyond the 500,000 jobs it added to the U.S. economy in 2017, schools in central, western and eastern Virginia are expanding wait-listed programs focused on business and fermentation science.
Austin Higgs (right), program manager at VCU’s Office of Continuing and Professional Education, attends the school’s “The Essentials of Craft Beer” course at Strangeways Brewing. (Photo by Jay Paul)
And while national growth has matured to a steady rate of nearly 4% annually, the craft brewing industry continues to thrive in Virginia and other hot spots across the country, according to Lee Graves, a Richmond Times-Dispatch beer writer and lecturer for the Virginia Commonwealth University Office of Continuing and Professional Education’s Essentials of Craft Beer course. Virginia has been leading the way nationally when it comes to flavor innovations, he adds.
“There are some beers brewed here that can stand shoulder to shoulder with any in the world,” Graves says.
Four-year and community colleges across the state offer courses and certificate programs to enrolled students or aspiring brewers and beer enthusiasts seeking continuing education in the growing industry. The following is a sample of what’s on tap in brewing education across the state.
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Lee Graves, a VCU instructor, lectures students at Strangeways Brewing. (Photo by Jay Paul)
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Forty-five students completed the University of Richmond’s Beer Brewer Professional course this year. (Photo courtesy University of Richmond)
Learning Essentials
Surrounded by steel tanks and wooden barrels at Strangeways Brewing’s Dabney Road location, Graves led attendees of a July session of the VCU course through a sampling of the brewery’s latest offerings. A series of consistently oddball brews — along with the taxidermy mounted in its taprooms — has contributed to the brewery’s quirky reputation. A Lucky Charms Berliner Weisse and other peculiar libations seem to have sprung from the imaginings of Willy Wonka.
Glasses in hand, the class took note of sweet, sour and roasted flavors and the presence of Belgian lace — traces of foam remaining in a beer glass, left behind by the head of a quality beer.
Graves covered the history of beer, brewed with yarrow and myrtle flowers before hops was a flavoring ingredient. In contrast to today’s diversity of brewing styles, a German purity law from the 1500s specified that beer could only be made of water, hops, barley and yeast, which remain pillars of the beverage. Few know that Thomas Jefferson, a recognized oenophile, was also a beer enthusiast. So it’s fitting that Virginia is a growing craft brewing leader following the 2012 end of a Virginia Alcohol and Beverage Control mandate requiring food to be sold on site to retail beer customers. This also added to the boom of food trucks parked outside breweries to serve hungry patrons.
“When the law was eliminated, all of these taprooms popped up without having to be restaurants,” Graves says. “That was huge.”
A second Essentials of Craft Beer session covered tools of the trade, business practices and further explanations of brewing processes. For more than a tasting pour, VCU Office of Continuing and Professional Education offers a certificate in craft brewing in partnership with the university’s School of Business, the VCU Brandcenter, the College of Engineering and the Department of Biology. The program offers two tracks, focused on either business or brewing.
Stephen Fong, a VCU engineering professor who lectures on quality assurance and process, is part of an interdisciplinary faculty team aiming to grow the program through the addition of laboratory equipment. The goal is to “bring participants through the entire brewing process from raw materials to the chemical analysis of finished products,” Fong says.
Bobby Faithful, an instructor at the University of Richmond, says there is more to craft beer than brewing. (Photo courtesy Bobby Faithful)
Quality Assurance
The University of Richmond and Virginia Tech announced a partnership this summer that expands the footprint of craft brewing education with the aim “to build a statewide educational standard for brewing in Virginia,” says Bobby Faithful, an instructor with the University of Richmond’s brewing education program.
The partnership brings together instructors and equipment, classrooms and brewing spaces utilized by brewing programs of the Virginia Tech Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement and UR’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. Instruction will be offered at locations in Roanoke and Richmond, drawing on industry partners in both regions of the state, with plans to expand course offerings to Northern Virginia.
Students will learn the business behind sourcing ingredients, brewing, packaging, distribution, sustainable practices and, of course, how to brew the most popular styles of beer. Finishing the course earns a journey worker’s completion certificate, a credential recognized across the U.S.
“Our students are getting jobs directly out of the program and working directly in the brewery. It’s not just instruction in the classroom,” Faithful says. “People are smelling these grains; people are getting their hands dirty and learning through doing.”
Students also learn to navigate the complexities of Virginia ABC laws, which came in handy for Hank Schmidt and his partners, who opened Richbrau Brewing in Shockoe Bottom in July. Schmidt attended UR’s program in 2016, before the Virginia Tech partnership.
The first iteration of three Richbraus dates to the 1930s. UR instructors helped Schmidt bone up on ABC requirements for resurrecting the Richbrau trademark, representative of a local staple well before the craft brewing craze.
“Acquiring a trademark is quite a lengthy process; you actually have to be [actively] in commerce,” Schmidt says. “We had to make sure we were hitting proper deadlines to show that our product was being used in commerce. It was kind of a mad dash and scramble to get there.”
“People are smelling these grains; people are getting their hands dirty and learning through doing.” —Bobby Faithful, University of Richmond’s Brewing Education Program
Faithful notes that a strength of the program is an internship requirement that encourages participants to explore ways to enter the industry aside from brewing.
“A lot of people join the program thinking they want to brew. By the end of it they’re like, ‘Hey, maybe I want to work in quality assurance [or] distribution,’ ” Faithful says. “We try to accommodate their interests and get them an internship somewhere that reflects their wants.”
An internship with Hardywood Park Craft Brewery led to a position for Erin Domagola as brand ambassador for the brewery. Domagola, who also has a degree in marketing, spreads the word at area restaurants and events about Hardywood’s creations. Her efforts help the brewery’s sales team secure placements at bars and retailers throughout Virginia.
Domagola credits the University of Richmond program with making her stand out in an industry drawing increasingly experienced talent.
“I don’t think I would be in the same position I am in now if I didn’t have the extra certification,” she says.
Sampling filtered beer at Seven Arrows Brewing Company is part of a Piedmont Virginia Community College brewing course. (Photo courtesy PVCC)
A Sought-after Trade
As the demand for skilled professionals increases in the craft brewing industry, Piedmont Virginia Community College Workforce Services — which specializes in trade certifications and professional development — is providing low-cost training.
Located in Charlottesville, another hub with many locations on what has been dubbed the beer trail, the community college offers hands-on brewing experience with instructors from Devil’s Backbone Brewing Co., part of Anheuser-Busch, and brewmaster Danny Wolf, co-owner of Wild Wolf Brewery in nearby Nellysford. Devil’s Backbone also subsidizes the cost of craft brewing certificate coursework.
Piedmont has offered classes in brewing for eight years and a commercial craft brewing course for two years that prepares students to test for an internationally recognized brewing certification.
“The certification is marketable and portable. You can take it anywhere,” says Greg Rosko, workforce services program manager. “Our mission is to provide a trained workforce for local industry, and one way to do that is to have an industry-recognized certification at the end of the class.”
To meet local industry needs, the college was awarded a GO Virginia Grant in 2018 to expand its food and beverage technical education training, of which brewing is part. The grant has been used to create a craft beer course, the “Sensory Evaluation of Beer.” Due to the growth of the alcoholic beverage industry as a whole within Virginia, the grant also contributes to the expansion of classes in distilling and vinting, including a course on the art of making the Japanese wine sake.
Old Dominion University zymology students tour the floor malting facility at Copper Fox in Williamsburg, one of a few distilleries that malt their own grain. (Photo by Dan Barshis)
The Science of It
A three-week course in the Biological Sciences department at Old Dominion University teaches students about the microbiology behind fermentation science, or zymology, which has been used for centuries to produce foods and beverages such as beer, yogurt and cheese. Newly acquired knowledge of yeasts and bacterial strains is put to the test when students brew beer on the college’s brewing rig, a smaller version of what commercial breweries use, optimized for test batches. Students also tour Hampton Roads breweries to taste the fruits of fermentation’s complex natural processes.
The course was created by Old Dominion biology professors Dan Barshis and David Gauthier, who have been brewing for fun since their college days.
They are also exploring contributing to academic research in brewing, particularly surrounding yeast, a single-celled fungi found throughout nature.
“There are a lot of different yeast strains out there that all have different characteristics,” Gauthier says. “So there is a lot of legitimate scientific research that could be done looking at the differences in these yeast strains and other outcomes in biology.”
Barshis and Gauthier hope to expand course offerings to include business and brewing history education that could go toward a brewing certificate.
“We’ve had a lot of discussions about turning this into a larger program.” Barshis says. “[People] are hungry for formal brewing education.”
