Originally Posted 10/25/07
Long before I finished school and even began looking for brewing jobs I heard all the warnings about brewing. The hours are tough, you better like cleaning, the work is physical, the pay is terrible, etc. In this respect, the job is exactly what I expected.
I am scheduled to work 10.5 hour days, but that typically gets stretched to 11 or 12. I was told when I was hired that I would only work weekdays, but as soon as I was trained I got moved to Sundays. Three day weekends aren't very fun when they take place mostly during the week. Sunday happens to be a late morning for me, because I get to come in at 4 AM. Monday I am scheduled at 1. Last Sunday night I watched Game 7 of the ALCS, which ended at 11:55 PM, and then had to leave immediately to make the 1 hour drive to work. If the Sox happen to have the opportunity to clinch the World Series this Sunday night, I may have to call in sick for the first time. Tuesday and Wednesday I get a bit of a break again and come in at 3:30. So do the hours suck? Yes.
I can spend anywhere from half an hour to two and a half hours of a given day cleaning. The vast majority of the cleaning we do is scrubbing fermenters. Once a beer is racked out of a vessel someone must climb in with a scraper, some scrub pads and a bucket of acid and clean the entire interior. You begin by scraping the yeast ring off the upper rim and then scrub every surface with acid. We have six 50 bbl vessels, nine 100 bbl and five 300 bbl. A 300 bbl fermenter is a square roughly 12 ft x 12 ft x 12 ft. Cleaning one of these alone can easily take upwards of two hours. Although I'm not allowed to, I've begun bringing my iPod in with me to curb some of the boredom. I was caught with it the other day by the one guy who actually cares. He didn't give me a too hard of a time, and simply told me I can't listen to it while working. It hasn't stopped me, though. Anyway, that's mostly what we do for cleaning. After two hours of scrubbing, your arms get pretty damn tired. The first day I had to clean one I thought my arms were going to fall off, but I've gotten used to it by now. One silver lining of the job is that my upper body is in the best shape of my life. It also takes a good bit of athleticism to climb around in fermenters all the time. This is really the most physical part of the job, far more than heavy lifting. I do a bit of that, but it's more the constant scrubbing, walking around on your feet for 12 hours a day, and running up and down stairs (the cold room is split between two floors) that wears you down over a week.
While this all sucks, the real physical challenge is the working conditions. I am constantly cold and wet. For the first few months I was getting myself sprayed with beer or water daily until I finally got the hang of remembering when I can or can't open valves, where to stand when doing certain things, not disconnecting lines under pressure and all sorts of other little bits of wisdom. I wear shin length boots to keep my feet dry. For a while this was not working, as I was still getting wet all the time and water was running right down my legs and pooling at my feet. I had a nasty case of athlete’s foot for a month or two. That has passed, but the boots have worn bald rings around my legs from all the abrasion. The front of each shin has a bright red scaly mark where the boots rub all day. Halfway through the day this rubbing gets too uncomfortable, so I roll my boots down a few inches. Now I have two bald rings and two red scaly sores on each shin. Cleaning chemicals frequently get spilled on my legs, which particularly burn when they hit the sores. My hands are even worse. About three weeks into the job the tips of my fingers began itching and peeling. It eventually spread all across my hands. The condition changes a bit from day to day, but they have never recovered and will not until I quit. Right now they are at least smooth and not peeling, but are hard and my fingers are actually permanently pruned. As soon as I go back to work Sunday and begin dipping my hands in iodophor constantly they will begin to peel all over again. I basically am missing about half the skin that belongs on my hands and fingers. This makes them extremely sensitive to heat, and causes me to bleed easily from shallow scrapes. It's probably a good thing I'm single right now because if I were a woman I wouldn't want to be touched with my sandpaper hands. I think the recovery of my hands is the first thing I am looking forward to when I do finally quit. I will try to post pictures if I can get some decent ones.
I do all of this for $11/hr. Even with the decent amount of overtime I log on a daily basis, that doesn't exactly add up to 110K annually. This is after my first raise. I made $10/hr the first four months. When I took the job I believed that these were all things I could tolerate because I was going to be brewing beer and that would be enough to make me happy.
In truth, if these were the only problems with my job I would be content. On the best days, I still believe this. I don't think I could do it forever, but I feel like I could tolerate all this shit as long as I am doing something I love. The problem is that this is simply not something I love.
No comments:
Post a Comment