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In collaboration with the Seibel Institute of Technology, the Glen Hay Falconer Foundation is offering a full-tuition brewing education scholarship in 2023. The scholarship is a full tuition grant and comes with a travel and lodging stipend.
The Michael James Jackson Foundation is now accepting new scholarship applications. The deadline to apply is July 1st 2022
The MJF is a grant-making organization that funds scholarship awards to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color within the brewing and distilling trades. The program is open to candidates at the beginning of their careers, as well as those looking to continue their education. Scholarships are awarded to attend brewing or distilling classes at 23 different educational programs across the country.
For more information on MJF and the open scholarships, visit the web site here.
The beer industry has been slow to recognize the challenges to employee mental health posed by its unique set of characteristics. Any job can be stressful, but mix in long hours in industrial work spaces and routine and frequent access to alcohol and it is easy to see how mental health and substance use issues can arise.
Failing to address and protect employee mental health causes substantial loss in productivity and ultimately revenue. Beyond the importance of helping to support valuable members of your team, studies routinely demonstrate that money spent on addressing common mental health issues returns a substantial value in terms of improved employee health, productivity, and retention.
Eastern Washington University and No-Li Brewhouse are partnering to launch a professional certificate program for the craft beer industry.
The 15-credit program, which begins in the fall, is designed for those wanting to advance their knowledge of craft beer or pursue jobs in the industry.
No-Li Brewhouse owners John and Cindy Bryant donated $10,000 to help launch the certificate program.
Creating an active, engaged in-house tasting and sensory program should be top of mind for brewers of every size. You spend so much time planning, brewing, cleaning, and often just trying to survive, outsourcing the beer sensory element of your business to consumers in your taproom or even machine or lab testing can be tempting. While there is great value in using lab work or your frontline tasters as part of your overall mechanism for ensuring product quality, it remains crucial to have a diverse array of brewery employees routinely taste and assess the quality and consistency of the beers that you produce. Let’s take a look at some key points in creating a tasting and sensory program.
Your team is set, and the business is humming along. Employees seem happy, the customers are keeping the coffers full and the tanks busy and for the first time in a long time you, as an owner, have a moment of peace and calm. Then reality sets in and thoughts of the future creep into your brain.
To keep the positive momentum going you need to make sure that everyone is equipped with the tools they need. This does not just mean physical equipment, but proper training as well. It is time to start thinking about additional, outside, training for your employees.
The American craft beer industry likes to talk about being small and independent and removed from big business culture. Living in the realm of small business it cultivates a scrappy and local image that resonates with a lot of consumers.
There are, however, some lessons or practices from corporate America that should be incorporated into smaller breweries. As the industry looks to grow and diversify and build a meaningful culture, creating an internal mentor program is a step in the right direction.
There are a lot of reasons to start a mentor program and it can be as intense or casual as a brewery wants, but the bottom line is that by connecting seasoned employees with newer ones can strengthen a company culture, create an avenue of collaboration, and begin a cycle that can continue for years to come.
Small companies will put a lot of work into hiring employees. The successful businesses will spend time researching the marketplace to come up with competitive wage and benefits to attract the best candidates.
After the interviews and hiring, everything should be set up for long-term success, right?
Anyone running a small business will tell you it is never that easy.
Beer is a dynamic beverage and even outside of the glass, from taproom experiences to packaging, the industry has fostered an air of creativity that should bring smiles to customer’s faces.
What about brewery employees? The day-in-day-out experience of clocking in and doing the expected work can quickly become rote, just like at any job. If beer is creative, the employees responsible from the brew deck to accounting should also be mentally stimulated to stay happy and productive and hopefully bring fresh energy into the brewery.
Here are a few ways to help keep staff feeling less like button pushers and more like creative outlets for good.
Read more…
It’s a wrap. The 2022 Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) and World Beer Cup (WBC) have concluded in Minneapolis with a projected 10,000 attendees. The Brewers Association handed out 307 awards to breweries from 57 different states in the largest WBC to date with over 10,000 entries.
The awards were presented in a ceremony Thursday evening at the conclusion of the CBC at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
Entries were evaluated by an elite panel of 226 judges from 28 countries. Competition judging took place in 18 sessions over nine days.
The human condition is designed for wandering and exploration. To expand the mind, horizons, and to collect experiences as we hurdle through life. We are also the only species that pays to live on the planet and as such need employment to keep us stocked with basic necessities and shelter. At times the desires and needs can be in conflict.
In thinking about employment there should always be a level of happiness that exists, a chance for creative sparks to catch flame, and proper rest achieved. To have those means better productivity and likely meaningful growth of a business. It can be easy to get stuck in a rut and day in and day out at the same job, trying to reach goalposts that are constantly moving can cause burnout or leg creativity stagnate.
Maybe it is time to consider adding a sabbatical offering to your company.
The Brewers Association announced the recipients of its 2022 Industry Awards. Five members of the brewing community were recognized and awarded for their dedication and service during the Craft Brewers Conference in Minneapolis, Minn. The Brewers Association has been recognizing individuals who inspire, defend, and innovate within the craft brewing industry since 1987. New this year was the addition of the Mentor of the Year Award to recognize volunteers who provided outstanding guidance through the fledgling Brewers Association mentorship program and championed those who experience barriers to access and advancement in their professional journeys.
Award recipients were nominated by their peers and determined by vote from committees made up of members of the Brewers Association board of directors or past award winners.
The F.X. Matt Defense of the Industry Award went to Sam Hendler, Steve Hindy received the Brewers Association Recognition Award, the Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Craft Brewing was handed to Karl Ockert and Annette May and Ramon Tamayo received the Brewers Association Mentor of the Year Award.
Let’s talk about health and wellness.
During THRIVE at the Craft Brewers Conference, now underway at the Minneapolis Convention Center, Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, Diversity Ambassador at the Brewers Association, said something profound in her intro about THRIVE. Paraphrased she said that the craft brewing industry has prioritized and largely solved quality in brewing. We as an industry have prioritized and largely solved safety. In nearly every area of our operations we have prioritized and upgraded our best practices to be the envy on any industry. Now is the time to do the same for people.
And that means Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Wellness and Wellbeing.
Every beer drinker has been there at least once. It’s a great day at the local taproom. Pints are flowing and everything just tastes great. A sense of desire creeps up and the entrepreneurial spirit rises. The idea to open a brewery of your own, or at least work at one, is born.
The next day the feeling might be faded or gone, but if it lingers and grows it might be time to start thinking about formal educational steps.
Minnesota is often derided as a so-called fly-over state that folks on the coasts never consider visiting. And for many Minnesotans, that suits them just fine. They know the value of their home state, especially the gem that is the Twin Cities. The same applies to Minnesota made beer. “Our breweries are relatively unassuming, maybe unpretentious,” says Jess Talley, the recently minted director of the Minnesota Brewers Guild. “That’s kind of a Minnesota cultural humility there that I think a lot of people may know as a stereotype of Minnesotans. Our brewers take a lot of pride in their work. And they should, we have a lot of amazing, award-winning beers here. But you’re not going to see a lot of Minnesotans gloating about that.”
The brewery passport craze, widespread throughout the country, was actually started in the Twin Cities nearly a decade ago by PubPass, a Minnesota-based company.
As the post-pandemic landscape has shifted promotional realities for bars and breweries, PubPass has been building a digital product that offers more flexibility and nationwide access to users. The app will officially launch at GABF 2022, but a free sneak preview is available to CBC attendees now. Use promo code PROBREWER3 for a 3-month trial of the PubPass app.
We tapped PubPass partner and Twin Cities native Jake Nyberg for a few nearby, can’t-miss stops.
Calling it “a conference within a conference” the THRIVE workshop will debut this year at the Craft Brewers Conference, that will explore diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), human resources (HR), and wellness topics.
Organizers say the workshop is an opportunity to develop a range of people-focused practices that elevate small businesses.
“The workshop will give attendees the opportunity for the kind of sustained in-depth engagement with people-centered practices and learning about DEI, HR, and wellness that is difficult to deliver in seminars that are spread out throughout CBC,” said J Jackson-Beckham, Brewers Association equity and inclusion partner.
If you’re traveling to the Craft Brewers Conference this year, Northeast Minneapolis should be near the top of your list for areas to visit. Also known as NE and sometimes Nordeast (in local parlance or for those celebrating with the Schell’s Brewery beer of the same name), this neighborhood boasts about a dozen solid breweries, many within a short walk of one another, along with great distilleries and beer bars. Just over the Mississippi River from downtown Minneapolis, Northeast is a bustling commercial and arts district that still possesses much of its original 19th and early 20th century architecture, including grain silos and mills.
THRIVE at this year’s 2022 Craft Brewers Conference is a roadmap to a CBC experience that fosters safe, inclusive, and equitable cultures where everyone in the craft brewing community can thrive. It includes a variety of seminars and workshops, a screening of the documentary film ‘One Pint at a Time’ and other activities.
This year’s THRIVE is being held in association with ProBrewer.
THRIVE was launched in 2021 as a curated passport to the Craft Brewers Conference. The Brewers Association has built upon last year’s effort with the addition of the THRIVE workshop. “It’s like a conference within a conference,” said J Jackson-Beckham, Brewers Association equity and inclusion partner. “The workshop will give attendees the opportunity for the kind of sustained in-depth engagement with people-centered practices and learning about DEI, HR, and wellness that is difficult to deliver in seminars that are spread out throughout CBC.”
There is a lot of planning that goes into making sure you get the most out of the educational experience at the Craft Brewers Conference. Selecting tracks and seminars and making sure the schedule works to get from one room to the next with plenty of time. Notebooks are ready, pencils are sharpened.
By the time the conference is over that notebook should be filled and those number twos mere nubs.
Now what?