Those interested in recreational homebrewing can learn how to brew their own stout at a new three-session workshop series offered by Lakes Region Community College.
The sessions will take place on Sunday, Aug. 7, Monday, Aug. 15, and Monday, Aug. 22, at the Canterbury Shaker Village, where participants will have the hands-on experience of completing every step of the brewing process from start to finish. The series will also include some lecture and discussion about the history, art and science of all-grain brewing.
The workshop instructor, Jon Shackett, is the owner of Shackett’s Brewing Company in Bristol and a high school biology teacher of 24 years. He said that when the college approached him and asked if he would teach the class, he couldn’t pass up the unique opportunity to merge his two professions.
“I love teaching and I love brewing, so it’s a nice way to combine my passions,” he said. “Brewing is a combination of many disciplines, but the biology of it is where the fermentation happens, and there’s a lot of chemistry involved as well, so there’s definitely some overlap between brewing and the biology I teach.”
The workshop is intended for people who are interested in brewing on an amateur level as opposed to commercial brewing, so participants will be working with equipment and methods designed for small-scale homebrewing. While the easiest kind of homebrewing involves mixing a premade malt extract with water, the workshop will be slightly more advanced; participants will pick the barley, mash it and produce the extract themselves from scratch.
The first session, the longest of the three, will be spent brewing.
“That takes five or six hours,” Shackett said. “There’s a lot of wait time while you’re heating the liquid to temperature and allowing the enzymes to do their thing, so that’s when I want our time to be driven by the interest of the participants. They’ll have a chance to ask me questions about anything they want to know about brewing.”
The second session will be about preparing the brew for bottling and transferring it from primary to secondary fermentation. The final session is reserved for bottling. Shackett will teach a few PowerPoint lectures in between on things like water chemistry and how to prepare the yeast for brewing.
“The brewing in this workshop is a relatively simple process. You don’t need any experience,” he said. “Curiosity and a desire to learn about brewing beer, those are the two main things you need.”
