Hi beer fans, another happy Friday to you! Come in and have a cold one with FNBB.
What if, when you went to college, you could really major in beer?
When California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, fired up its gleaming new stainless steel brewery in December, it joined a small but growing number of colleges instructing students how to produce high-quality craft beers. At the same time, it took the movement a step beyond -- kegging the results of their labors and selling it on campus.
"To make the beer here and sell the beer here and have a cafe and have an educational component, we're the first to have put all those pieces together"
Colorado State University expects to begin selling its microbrewed beer at a campus pub later this year, ...Students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Oregon State University and other campuses around the country also make beer ...
A pioneer in the process is the University of California, Davis, where students have been brewing beer since the makers of Lucky Lager built them a microbrewery in 1959. Like the other campuses, however, Davis doesn't sell beer and has no plans to. Charlie Bamforth, the university's Anheuser-Busch endowed professor of brewing science, believes getting into the retail end of things would be a distraction for him and his students.
Charlie Bamforth is possibly America's #1 brewing academic, but he might be wrong here. I bet a lot of his students have fantasies of their own pub or microbrewery, and would welcome exposure to selling and serving beer. At Cal Poly Pomona this grew out of the hospitality management program; when you already run your own hotel, opening a brewpub isn't so weird.