Beer brewing might sound like a fictional course out of some sort of comedy poking fun at college classes, but the Engineering School's Rodman Scholars Program proves that thought wrong.
Rodman Scholars are required to take four seminars, or RodSems, during their four years at the University, and for the past two years, the program has offered a seminar on beer brewing for students who are at least 21 years old. The Rodman Scholars president for the 2005-06 school year approached Program Director Dana Elzey with a proposal for a beer brewing class.
"I thought it was intriguing," Elzey said, noting that the purpose of Rodman seminars is to provide Engineering students with a course that is fun, educational and on a topic other than those to which they are routinely exposed.
Since the beer brewing seminar's inception, many Rodman Scholars have gone through the course, coming out with an entirely different perspective on beer.
The class is held at the Starr Hill Brewery and is taught by the master brewer there.
"I found the class really useful," third-year Engineering student Bayle Quek said. "I've never had formal training on tasting or appreciate beer. Learning the entire process and learning the difference between the different types of beer really helped a lot."
Quek said the class is about learning how beer is brewed and how varying factors in the brewing process can lead to different types of beer.
"It's definitely made me a better beer drinker because now I'm more aware of the subtleties in the different types of beers," he said.
The class also changed Quek's outlook by making him more willing to try different types of beer, he added.
"Having gone through the class, I've realized there are many, many varieties of beer," Quek said. "Most people only a drink a few of the more common ones, but people should try the less popular ones to find out what they really like."
Quek said he gained a lot from the class, which was the hope of the program leaders when they first started the course.
Beer brewing is "one of those things that is an art, a science and an engineering technology," Elzey said. "That's something I really like."
When the course was first proposed to Elzey, he thought of his first exposure to the engineering involved in a task like beer brewing: a student project focusing on the wine-making process.
One of the owners of the small, family-owned winery that was the focus of the project came to class and explained the many steps of the wine-making process, including the importance of recirculating fluid and solid components to extract the optimal flavor, something the student group studied in its project. The group's final product was a closed-loop, feedback-sensing device implemented in one of the steps of the wine-making process.
"Engineers could automate the whole [wine-making] process, but that would detract from the value and interest in it, and beer is certainly similar," Elzey said. "Customer needs are important to consider. We need to know the engineer's limits."
In this sense, the beer-brewing course teaches students both about the engineering involved in the process and the context in which the product is created and marketed. Overall, the course seems to elicit from most the same response Elzey had when the beer brewing course was first proposed to him: "I wish I could've taken that one"
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