Persian ice cream-inspired lagers. Green tea India pale ales. Farmhouse ales made of upcycled stale bread. Big Red Brewing specializes in crafting flavors you cannot find at Wegmans, opening new doors for brew connoisseurs.
Big Red Brewing is a graduate student organization that collaborates with local breweries and provides opportunities for homebrewing and food science research. Each year, the club brews its own beer in honor of Oktoberfest and competes in the U.S. Open College Beer Championship. The club earned gold and bronze medals last year.
Club members and faculty can brew and taste beer at Big Red Brewing events throughout the year. According to Ph.D. student Andrew Wilhelm, the group’s brewing coordinator, the process consists of five steps — mashing, wort boiling, chilling, adding yeast and fermenting.
“What’s nice about the brewing process in general and [brewing] your own beer is that you get to taste the beer at different steps,” Andrew said. “You get to try and see the impact of if you use different grains or if you use different hops.”
After mashing, a process that heats the grains with water, members sample the leftover sugary liquid called “wort.” Then, members can taste the difference after boiling and adding in hops, the key ingredient that gives beer its bitterness. Because the fermentation process can take weeks, Andrew said the club organizes social events for members to taste the final beer.
Last year, Big Red Brewing acquired a $6,000 donation in brewing equipment from RahrBSG and upgraded to a 15-gallon brewing system. Andrew said the club hopes to use it to test how water chemistry differences affect the enzymes activated and the beer’s final taste.
With this upgrade, Big Red Brewing President Dean Hauser ’17 said a main goal this year is to increase club membership and event outreach. Hauser, a Ph.D. student in food science, said the club is also looking for new officers and encourages anyone interested in joining to reach out.
“Continuity with student organizations is something that can be difficult,” Hauser said. “We’re pretty open to letting people [who are] interested in getting involved or want[ing] to plan an event — we’re very interested in facilitating that because we have a lot of funding this year, and we have a lot of capacity.”
The club has also attracted interest from students outside of food sciences. Andrew and his twin brother, Brewing Coordinator Aaron Wilhelm, are both graduate students in electrical engineering. Aaron said he has enjoyed working with food science students, who have taught him tips for homebrewing.
“Food science people are fun to be [around] in the sense that they’re very good tasters, [so] you get better at tasting off flavors,” Aaron said. “Even [if you are a food science student], most food science people [don’t necessarily] know a lot about brewing or beer, so there’s still stuff there for you to learn.”
The value of Big Red Brewing’s homebrewing, Andrew said, goes beyond science. There is also an element of fun when creating recipes to test.
“If you’re going to be doing this at home on your own, you’re probably only going to brew at most five gallons, so you don’t get to try these different things of adding tea or not adding tea, [which we can do because we brew a lot more beer],” Andrew said. “That’s one of the fun things about brewing, and it’s interesting because [there’s] both a science and an art to it.”
Lorna Ding ’28 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at [email protected].