Fermentation is a fun area to work. The
people who do brew beer do so very
passionately and they are great people
to work with.
One wonderful thing about the fermentation industry is that everybody
likes to talk about what they do.
Everyone likes to explain the history of
their beer, why theirs is different,
everything is a story. And one great
thing about the industry is there's not
a lot of trade secrets. People go to the
scientific conferences and they say "We
tried this, we got this, we tried this."
There's a lot of very positive attitudes
and the idea is as an industry we all
sink or we all swim.
I love testing a theory and seeing that
come to fruition and seeing the massive
change between a fermentation where we've
changed one parameter versus the
controls that have all come out very
tight. That's just a phenomenal feeling
that, yes, we are showing conclusively
that this one parameter that we can change is making a difference and we
can see immediately how we can begin to
apply that industrially and how this can
make a major difference in our industry.
The work that I'm doing specifically
with different pressure fermentation,
different ways to facilitate carbon
dioxide evolution and removal, different
ways to treat our yeast so that they're
less stressed ... this is all going to
contribute to how and where we can use
fermentation in these industries. I've
been working on brewing since I began my
Ph.D. so that's coming up on 10 years now. It has been a wonderful journey over
these last nine years and things are going
well.
