A student says, “are hops used for anything other than beer?”
We’re sitting in the second floor lab of 215 King Street East, which houses the Chef’s House at George Brown College. The Chef’s House is a gem that doesn’t get enough public recognition in Toronto. The students stage there as they approach the end of their time at the college in either the Culinary or Hospitality specialties. As you walk by on King Street, you can see them prepping desserts or microgreens in the window. The menus are not only delicious but affordable.
“Some people will use them to make tea and tinctures, but it’s not very common. I’ve heard it said that people will use them in pillows as a soporific to help them to sleep.” Light on my feet, I edit out “but singing works just fine for me.” James Taylor might not land.
I pivot a little. “In fact, most people don’t come into contact with barley very often either.” Canada exports three quarters of a billion dollars worth a year. “Unless you’re buying multigrain bread or cooking something specifically like a Russian soup with pearl barley, beer is where you’re most likely to encounter it.” Two of the students discuss the soup they make briefly. I should get back on track, but I digress further.
“You know, I’ve been teaching for eight years, and this is a class where people are interested in the subject matter. No one signs up for a beer class who doesn’t already know a little bit about beer. I’ve been paying attention for a long time and I’ll sometimes write about flowers and how the terpenes and sesquiterpenes equate to the essential oils in hops. Then I come in to teach Beer One and have to explain that hops exist at all. It will drive you crazy if you think about it.”
I had been thinking about it. As I’m writing this there are notes on my desk and bookmarks to scholarly papers with gas chromatography about flowers; a real corker of a piece on lilac, amanogawa cherry blossom, crab apple, and eastern redbud that will be read by about nine people. The blooms are faded by this current heat dome and the ability to experience them eleven months distant. I’ll get to it some January evening. Despite the fact I’m an English major, I really want to build the subject’s literature.
Which begs the question: How much should people know about a subject and when? How much do they need in order to do the job they need to do?
It’s a question that’s on my mind this half semester since I’m teaching two classes. Wednesday night we have the Level 2 WSET Award in Beer. Thursday night is the George Brown Beer Certificate’s Beer 2 course, which is essentially structured as Grain to Glass. I’m glad they’re in that order since they’re very different sets of material.
—————
The WSET Beer programming is new, not just to Ontario, but world wide. I had to go to Chicago last summer in order to become an accredited instructor and I must be one of the first twenty or thirty people delivering the material on a global basis. I’m unique in the sense that I must be the only one who has also developed their own certificate at a Collegiate level.
Crucially, the WSET Beer programming is standardized and globally so. This can’t help but be a good thing. There are currently people offering it all over the planet and hopefully the end result is a standardization of information in the wild. In the wake of the craft beer boom, people have a lot of disparate ideas about styles and flavour profiles. It’s 2025 and Fuller’s ESB isn’t an ESB, but Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is. A global standardization would potentially cut down on some of that style slide.
If you’re in a program with self study like the BJCP or Cicerone, which is really just a self administered syllabus with an exam, you have to work with what you’ve got locally. Your entire thought process about a subject can only deal with the qualia you have to work with and your experiences. Your understanding in Ontario might be different than someone on the West Coast’s.
The reason I like the WSET’s programming is that the students have in-class tasting and an exam at the end of the course. There’s a textbook and workbook for them to refer to at home and in class. Standardized qualia. Power Point slides I didn’t have to develop (I have spent months on slides in the last decade). Beers in established styles that will remain on store shelves. With the logistical gymnastics we go through for the George Brown Beer One course in the British and Postmodern Outliers weeks, the WSET is a luxury to instruct.
That said, it puts me in the odd position of more frequent self editing. During the training much was made of keeping the information available to students at the appropriate level. The purpose of the course is to pass the exam and become an accredited professional. The WSET’s cachet means that you don’t have to explain the designation, and that’s a big deal. Wine people generally don’t know what the Cicerone designation is, but they know the WSET. Instant credibility in a wider industry is priceless.
I’d be doing a disservice to the students if I presented material that was too advanced. The material for 16 hours of instruction has to be finite. There’s nothing stopping them from doing more reading if they’d like to, and, of course, I can explain things outside of class time if they have questions.
It’s worth mentioning that George Brown’s WSET Level 2 Award in Beer is the most affordable version in the world.
——————————
The Grain to Glass course is very different. When I was writing about the Beer One course at George Brown last year, I mentioned that the first exercise was a little like charlatanism or psychic cold reading. Tasters are suggestable. You can draw them out on tasting notes and flavour profiles. “Is there anything fruity?” you might ask, channeling your best confusion and furrowed brow.
When I was eight or nine, I went with my dad to see Penn & Teller at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. I got to go up on stage and throw a dart at Teller! My flies were also undone, so I got a big laugh, although pretty much at my expense. I would go on to watch every special they were on and still watch Fool Us to this day. This is to say that as soon as you see the Lift Off Of Love routine, especially as a kid, you’re pretty much hooked.
I always want to show people how the trick is done, and that was how I started to develop the Grain to Glass course at George Brown. We have a brewing school in the province, and Niagara College does a great job at training brewers. It takes about 18 months. I have six weeks. I can’t train brewers. I have just enough time to lay bare how beer works. My course is for people who want to understand the nuts and bolts of the subject from the bottom up. A lot of them take up homebrewing.
We talk about ingredients and how they work right down to spec sheets. We taste them alongside the beers that they go into. We design a recipe and brew a beer. We learn how draught lines work and the realities of cellaring and different packaging formats. As far as I know, I’m the only person in Canada who’s routinely administering the Siebel Intermediate Off Flavour course (worth the price of admission by itself, incidentally). On the final exam they have to apply what they’ve learned in order to break down the beer we brewed and tell me how we could do it better next time. All that for less than $250.
It’s Saturday morning and one of the students from the last Beer One class which ended ten days earlier has invited me on a ride along to train some restaurant staff on the beer they have on tap. The menu is largely Mediterranean and the staff are young; probably some of them are seasonal hires since the patio is open and sweltering.
Do they need to know what a hop is? Probably not. They need to read the customer. They need to make them feel welcome. They need to make sure the glass isn’t empty. Post pandemic, some of this is non-intuitive. “Going out to eat should be an experience. There are a lot of places where you can spend a hundred dollars on dinner, but if you make them happy they’ll come back.”
We talk about the creaminess and spicy notes in the Hefeweizen and how it might go with Goat Cheese or possibly complement the coriander and cardamom in a skhug. How to position the Hazy IPA as an analogue to fruit juice, which you might find on menus in that part of the world. “Some countries don’t have beer. You can offer them both.”
“Take five minutes of your chef’s time on a slow day and learn about the ingredients in the dishes you’re serving. Think about the commonalities in flavour. If you can get excited about it, the customers will be as well.” It’s landing pretty well, although I think some of them were out late.
Craft Beer has been suffering from brain drain, not unlike the rest of the service industry. People got out because of the pandemic and some of the lifers are uninspired and going through the motions. Regardless of the level of instruction, the job is to get people excited about the material. Whether it’s for tips or a professional accreditation or the knowledge for its own sake, you have to structure it for their purpose.