“He was a wise man who invented beer.” –Plato
You probably guzzled down a lot of beer in college, but did you brew any of it? Or, even better, get credit hours for it?
Now, students can minor in craft-beer brewing at Paul Smith’s College in upstate New York, the college announced this month.
No jokes about students with plastic kegs making PBR knockoffs—if you can imagine PBR getting any worse.
Paul Smith’s College specializes in majors like forestry and culinary arts, where students get their hands dirty and technical experience in field research and the kitchens of four-star resorts. Recently retired Dunkin’ Donuts CEO Jon Luther is an alumnus.
Joe Conto, the director of the Hospitality, Resort and Tourism Management Program at Paul Smith’s, is the man behind the beer, according to National Journal. A homebrewer himself, Conto found brewing to play an increasingly important role in the food courses he was already teaching.
“Beer just began to take up more and more of the semester,” Conto told the Journal. “It became more and more interesting to the students, certainly, but to me as well. And then I realized, holy cow I could teach a course just on beer. And then I said, ‘Well, really, I could teach a whole major on beer.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just settle for a minor.’ ”
But students won’t just be brewing and drinking beer—they’ll be marketing it too. The academic program includes a course on marketing and advertising, food chemistry including the basics of brewing and fermentation, a brewing lab component taught by a local brewer, and a course on the business component of selling and turning a profit on their products, along with other electives on the food and beverage industry.
The business of brewing and consuming beer is changing rapidly. And home brewers are on a winning course.
The number of craft breweries in the United States grew over 15 percent from 2012 to 2013, according to the Brewers Association. Of craft breweries, regional breweries and microbreweries (a brewery that produces less than 15,000 barrels of beer per year) have exploded even while beer industry giants face declining sales.
Big breweries are even introducing new products to try to capture some of craft beer’s popularity. Anheuser-Busch in Saint Louis quietly released Shock Top; and MillerCoors released craft-tasting Blue Moon, beverages which many beer fans don’t realize are made by industry Goliaths.
According to Conto, the popularity of craft beer is part of a changing cultural perception of beer from a low-class working man’s drink to a regional product carefully and lovingly made. Craft beer also embodies some of the surprising characteristics of millennial consumers and, thus, Paul Smith’s students: frugality, social consciousness, and quality.
“These are students that have grown up in a world that has started to push away the idea of big box, nationwide consistency,” Conto says. “They have really grown up in a time period where the idea of local, the idea of entrepreneur is much more interesting.”
Even President Obama has gotten in on the trend. He bought a home brewing kit for the White House kitchen in 2011 and has made three honey-varieties. The recipes can be found on the White House blog if you’re feeling experimental.
College students increasingly are working in fields unrelated to their college majors. In 2010, only 27 percent of graduates had a job that was related to their major. The decision to study craft brewing—a practical skill operable at any age that produces a valuable and obvious product in a growing industry—may be one of the more worthwhile reasons to accrue student loan debt. Maybe you’ll even make a drink worth drinking.
