mash, hops, and a wobbly wheelbarrow
how a family brewing project sparked a career in food
Growing up, I wasn’t all that interested in food. Like many folks, it was more of a necessity than a hobby. It wasn’t all protein bars and such; I’m more of a Chewy Granola bar guy myself. Outside of working at our family’s pizza shops, where we would attempt a Chicago deep dish without the proper pans, I was content with a dinner of pork loin with copious quantities of mashed potatoes. Hobbies and mild interests can have an outsized impact on your life, and this is a story of how I turned one into a budding career.
Once I got into college, brewing became enticing for obvious reasons, you didn’t need to be twenty-one to buy yeast and malt. Having Bell’s Brewery just up the road in the big city of Kalamazoo set a precedent as well, and their homebrew shop enraptured me. I was able to talk with my dad about getting a brewing kit to start learning the process. Studying chemistry and biology, I figured it was a somewhat easy sell to my parents to let me experiment, in a way.
We picked up the brown ale kit during my winter break at Kalamazoo College, where we would have about six weeks off—a perfect amount of time to have bottles ready to share before going back for the winter quarter. There was still an old stock pot from the pizza stores in our garage from when they had to make the sauce in-house, and I was able to cobble together an older turkey burner and propane tank to get to work in the driveway. I carried the brewing buckets into the kitchen, filled them up with a few gallons of water in the sink, and carried them down the stairs outside.
Between splitting wood from a recently felled tree with my dad in the side yard, I would check temperatures and pour in the malt extract. My dad and I had never brewed before, so this was both an unknown smell and an intoxicating one, given our love for malted milk balls, chocolate malts, and the underlying flavor of malt vinegar we would put on our coney fries from Nisker’s. While the wort (yes, that’s a technical term) boiled with hops, we felt the smell become pungent and fill our wood-splitting work area with this malty, grassy curiosity.
We had an hour to kill, and this tree was quite the behemoth. Yard projects were a constant part of my childhood: cleaning gardens, putting down mulch, helping with trimming hedges. You name the garden task, and I’ve probably done it at least once. As much as I disliked it, it’s likely why I now have an apartment full of plants, asked for heirloom seeds this past Christmas, and am searching for a neighborhood garden plot. Regardless, these trunks weren’t going to split themselves, and my dad was excited because he borrowed an automatic splitter to make the work somewhat easier. That’s if you consider two guys lifting massive tree trunk rounds into a wheelbarrow with a flat tire and pushing it over damp soil to an automatic machine easier.
Towards the end of the wort boiling, the last step before preparing to ferment, we loaded our biggest and last trunk onto the wobbly wheelbarrow and slowly trudged it to its final destination. Being the college-aged youngblood, I was tasked with pushing while my dad made sure it stayed steady. But with it being loaded unevenly, it didn’t take long for it to spill over the edge onto my dad’s foot. A few expletives were yelled to the heavens about his big toe now being a little less big. We angrily loaded it back in with better weight distribution, and he hobbled near me, albeit further out of the splash zone.
I felt bad, but the boil was done, and I had to get back to this trial hobby and leave him to split the trunk round. I sanitized my equipment and filtered out the hops, letting the brew drop in temperature to pitch yeast. While the wort cooled, so did my dad’s frustration with his toe. When he came back up to the driveway, he had an idea for the name of our first beer: Broken Toe Brown Ale. We laughed about it and decided it was the perfect way to christen the maiden voyage of the brewing kit.
I devoured brewing science books and continued to learn more about beer styles the world over. This budding interest gave me the realization of how much joy that subpar beer created – not only from the enjoyment of drinking something you created but from sharing the story of how and why it was made. Brewing was part of my life throughout college and after graduation, and this moment is one that I can point to as the spark that unraveled a flurry of reading food journalism and looking into food as a career.
It opened the door to work in breweries and distilleries in San Sebastián and Copenhagen; places I’d never considered charting my path in food. I’m grateful my parents gifted me these simple plastic buckets and glass bottles, among other life lessons, because it brought me into a world that I would have never otherwise known existed.
You never know what will create motivation in someone when they’re young. The world is full of possibilities, which for me was both incredible and intimidating, and having the ability to explore and dive deep into a hobby gave me purchase onto one of these possibilities. Always try something new (within certain limits, obvs), and try to give someone the ability to grow their own knowledge. It just might be something that gives them drive and a chance to change their world by making that purpose manifest.
