Why Exactly I Hate My Job (part 2 of 3) (archive)

Originally Posted 10/25/07

As I said, I could tolerate the bad hours and the abuse on my hands if this was a job I loved, but it simply is not. There are two main reasons for this. One, brewing just doesn't satisfy what I want in a career. This I will explain in part 3.

The other reason is that I just don't buy into the system I have found myself a part of. I came to a craft brewery to make beer a product that I believed in. Many beer geek friends took jabs at the brewery I chose to work for (yes, I had other options) due to the negative reputation, but I just laughed it off. I honestly came here liking most of the beer we make. I thought that we made a quality, if sometimes inconsistent, product. I quickly learned that my dad was right: businesses are about making money first and product second. Our rushed brewing process is typical of the general attitude regarding the beer: crank it out, get it out the door and onto store shelves. Success is dictated by sales.

Thanks to our fall seasonal pumpkin beer, which is actually the same exact base beer as all of the other fruit beers we brew, the past few months have been absolutely dominated by brewing beer that everyone in the brewery hates. I would estimate that over 50% of the beer that has gone out the door since mid-July has been some incarnation of this artificially flavored wheat beer. We continue to hear stories about the pumpkin beer selling off the shelves and winning awards, and we continue to laugh. Who is drinking this stuff? we constantly wonder. While pumping out this garbage constantly, any criticism about the quality of our product is countered with "we're setting sales records, so we're obviously doing something right." For those who have wondered just how different it is to brew with real fruit versus extracts, the truth might be even more frightening than you ever imagined. We brew a bland wheat beer and then right before carbonation (after filtration) add a foul alcohol based extract syrup. At first I wondered why we wouldn't want to ferment out some of the sugars in the fruit extract, but it turns out there are none. I once got some extract on my finger and licked it off. For about 10 minutes I wanted to throw up, it was that disgusting. I had rated the blueberry beer we make prior to taking the job, but took my ratings down when I started work. I now understand why my impression was "an unpleasant flavor of rotten fruit."

Furthermore, any problems with a product are essentially ignored. A recent batch of a beer that we make under contract came out with a flaw. We were detecting a phenolic off flavor. The response to the problem was to shrug our shoulders and send it out anyways. We got a high number of complaints about it from customers. Better luck next time, I guess.

I am instructed not to filter a beer over 32 degrees, yet if I ever told someone that the beer wasn't ready to be packaged because I shut down the filter due to high temperatures I think I might be crucified. Lately we have had problems with a few beers not attenuating fast enough (as fast as we want them to). Since our racking and filtering schedule is set far in advance, this meant that beers were to be racked 12 hours after they finished attenuating and filtered 24 hours after that.  In a typical example, rather than alter the schedule for the sake of the beer, I was told to just go ahead with it.  "It's going to be a bitch to filter," I said to my boss, the cold room supervisor. "They don't give a shit, it's on the schedule so it has to be done," he responded, speaking of the brewmaster and brewhouse manager, who had told him to go ahead with it.

We use corn syrup in one of our brews. When the alpha acid % changes with a new hop shipment we simply adjust all hop additions such that the same amount of alpha acids are being used, regardless of when that hop addition is and what hop we are using. In other words, say the recipes are written for Cascades at 5%AA, and the new shipment has 10%AA, we simply use twice as much Cascades in any given addition. Now where is the craft in that?

Yes, we sterile filter our beer, but only for aesthetics. We don't filter stouts because no one can see the difference. When we rack beer we add fining agents. We add alginex, XLC (which is a silica gel compound) and isinglass (the famous fish guts). We even add finings to our casks. I have tried to argue that this is completely counter to the entire concept of cask beer, but it falls on deaf ears.

We add "antifoam" to fermenting beers when the yeast head is about to spill over the top of the fermenter. I don't know exactly what it is, but I know it works by breaking polar bonds and causing the foam to break up and settle in the same way that soap breaks surface tension on water. Whatever that chemical is, do you really want it in your beer? We aren't allowed to use it on organic beers though, so there's another reason to go organic. And, I won't repeat my problems with the questionable fermentation practices. So, why bother with quality control when everything you do is designed to eliminate quality from your product in the first place?

Everything is geared towards getting the beer out the door. On a daily basis we are scheduled to filter and carbonate beer for it to be packaged immediately. In other words, if we have any delay at all, we are often holding up the packaging line. We have four 300 bbl conditioning tanks, but I can't remember the last time we actually filled one. We are always splitting up our 300 bbl brews into 3 or more 100 bbl tanks to make sure the beer is ready on time. It gets beer out a bit faster, but requires a lot more labor, eventually costing the brewery. We desperately need someone with some business sense to come in and actually analyze how much time and money we are losing doing things the way we do, but that will probably never happen. We are expecting to make around 75,000 bbls of beer this year, yet we do everything exactly the same way as when we were just starting out making 10,000 bbls.

Our facility can't even take it. Like I said, we aren't supposed to filter over 32 degrees, but our coolant system can hardly handle this. All through September it was constantly breaking down. Years ago legend has it that we could actually get filter temperatures around 28 degrees, but the lowest I have ever seen is 30. It’s far more common to filter around 31 or 32, though. Our brewery just wasn't designed to push out 75,000 bbls. Of course, we just pushed right through, getting that beer out the door.

Our carbonation system is incredibly hands on and error prone. We have been having untold troubles with getting our carbonations right and getting beer ready in time. Apparently, no one has ever thought to try to schedule things so we actually have some wiggle room in case anything does go wrong.

Then, you have the standard pitfall of any small business: bad management. On Sunday mornings the brewhouse manager works in the cold room with me. He is the guy that makes the schedule every week, deciding what day and time everyone will come in and posting it in the office. In other words, he schedules himself. Most of us have relatively fixed weekly schedules, but he moves himself around a bit. He tends to schedule himself at a different time each Sunday, yet never ever comes in at that time. This Sunday he was only 45 minutes late, by far his best performance since I've been working Sundays with him. 2 hours late is far more typical.
One weekend he was going to Vermont on Saturday and driving back to work Sunday morning. He conservatively scheduled himself at noon, hoping he could be back by then. By 2 PM he still wasn't in so someone called him and asked when he would be. He said he was stuck in traffic in Boston and would be there in two hours. For those of you who don’t know where I work, I’ll just say that Boston is not on the way here from Vermont. Not a single production employee would ever pull this kind of shit, but he doesn't even try to hide it. When he works he basically does the bare minimum and then bitches about how much he works and how much more we have to do.

The brewmaster only brews once or twice a week. One of his responsibilities is to make the production schedule, deciding what we will brew and when. There are frequently mistakes on the schedule, like a beer that is supposed to be racked, filtered and packaged that was never scheduled to be brewed. One day a cold room employee caught one of these mistakes. One type of beer was brewed, and then the next week that same batch number was attributed to a different type of beer on the schedule, which was supposed to be bottled. This was caught two days before it was to be racked and three days before it was to be bottled and shipped out. This doesn't seem like a huge deal until you know that the beers are pre-sold, so the brewmaster had sold a shipment of beer that didn't exist. His response was to chew out the employee who caught the mistake and ask him why no one had caught it sooner. After a bit of a closer look we discovered that the brewmaster himself had brewed the beer in question; the one brew he did that week. If anyone in the brewery should have caught the mistake it was him, yet he blamed us for it...and the management wonders why no one takes accountability for mistakes and blames them on everyone else around them.

So yeah, maybe if I just worked at a different brewery I would be much happier. I just have no respect for how things are done here on virtually any level.

(part 3 coming tomorrow at the earliest) [ED note: This is in the original post.  Part 3 was never written, but eventually will be]