What was your weirdest brewing class?

[FatDragon]

As a teacher or a student.

I teach at a small, newly-opened Montessori kindergarten in central China. We're putting on this huge, ghastly all-day event for New Year's Eve. Last night, when they asked me what I would be responsible for most of the event, I made a joke that I would teach the fathers of our kids to brew beer. Much to my surprise, my boss's eyes lit up and she said, "Yeah, that's a great idea, they'll love it!"

So tomorrow, when I would normally be taking care of and teaching EFL to kids 2-6 years old, I will instead be brewing a BIAB oatmeal stout and teaching some basic brewing to a bunch of rich Chinese men in their thirties. As an officially sanctioned kindergarten activity...

 

[AkTom]

Nice. I'm sure they'll love it, if only for the novelty of it.

 

[BeerLoverHere]

Right on! That's cool. It seems I am always teaching a buddy how to brew as the craft beer/homebrew movement moves into Indiana, United States. All my buddies drink my stuff and have been for years. Now they want to try to brew on their own. It sure is a good time. Maybe get those rich folk you speak of drunk during the process and have them buy you some better equipment/talk them into buying it and use it!

 

[FatDragon]

Well, we did it today. Attendance was low - only one parent stuck around through the whole brewday and another several popped by for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours. We did the class in another building from the rest of the New Year's party because of the facilities, so that prevented a lot of parents from popping in.

I got some good Chinese beer terminology practice during the class, not just brewing but talking about beer styles, ingredients, and flavor profiles as well.

There were a couple mistakes, most of which were easy to deal with, like blackening the exterior of my kettle and a hot break boil over (both caused by an unfamiliar burner) but one screwup was a real doozy: I knew both of my thermometers were causing issues, but since I didn't have time to get a new one, I just crossed my fingers and brought both of them to the brewday. Thermometer number one, tested in boiling water, returned a reading of 75.9 Celsius. I didn't test thermometer number two in water because it was reading the ambient temp (about 14 Celsius) as 55 Celsius. After some panicking and sending my wife off to a store where they turned out to have zero thermometers capable of reading beyond 60 Celsius, I decided to do a little bit of math. 15 liters of 100 degree (boiling) water, plus 7 liters of 15 degree (tap) water should roughly equal 22 liters of 73 degree water, right? We'll find out in about three weeks!

On the bright side, there were a couple notable positives about brewing there (it's the kitchen for our school, which prepares lunch for about 60 people every day): the jet burner saved me about 45 minutes in reaching the boil, and would have saved me another 20-30 minutes reaching strike temps if not for Thermometergate. The industrial size double sink with taps on each side also saved at least 20 minutes of chilling time, since I was able to chill externally via water bath while also running my immersion chiller. Now if only I can convince my wife I need those things at home, I could potentially cut a couple hours off of my regular brewdays...

 

[ghohn]

Only in Asia, right?