Living the Dream: Turning Pro Part 19
My answer to him was that it is never too late to follow your dream. The moment you stop pursuing your dreams, you might as well be dead. That is absolutely true and I will always stand by that claim. You should always live life and make of it what you can. But I can’t help but mention the flip side too. We know that it takes determination, persistence, creativity, and passion. The great thing is you can have all of those things no matter what your age, but there is a practical side to consider.
If you have deep pockets and can hire plenty of people to do the hard work, then you can go that route. The issue is when you can’t afford that, which is pretty much everyone that might want to open a brewery. So what is the physical demand in a brewery? You need to be able to lift empty kegs, sacks of malt, and push around pallets of grain. Brew days are long and physically demanding, dragging around heavy hoses, cleaning mash tuns, and many other tasks. Other days aren’t much easier and distribution day can be a
challenge too. Note that I said empty kegs. Nobody should be lifting full half-barrel kegs by themselves. Certainly, it is often possible, but it isn’t really wise. The chance of causing permanent physical damage is not small, even with proper lifting technique.
At Heretic we team lift things like full kegs, but even still, I’d love to get a lift for the delivery van to make the whole process easier. In fact, we try to find tools or methods of working in order to reduce the physical demand where possible. I’ve visited a lot of different breweries and more often than not, it is clear that reducing the physical demands on the brewer is not high on the priority list. I’m always amazed when a brewer needs to carry sacks of grain up or down multiple flights of stairs. Sometimes they need to carry the grain multiple times. Once when delivered, a second time to mill the grain, and a third when it is time to remove the spent grain. I understand that there are often limitations on buildings and on the funds
available to install solutions, but sometimes it is just that the comfort of the brewer is unimportant to those in charge. Maybe it is just me, but I think better and do a better job when I’m not struggling to survive physically.
And even worse, there are some breweries where the safety of the brewer gets short shrift as well. Simple stuff like chemical-safe goggles and gloves. Eye wash stations and fire extinguishers. Dust masks and hearing protection for the mill room. All of this stuff costs very little to implement and there is no excuse for allowing your employees to work without these basic protections. When we don’t keep things like safety and physical demand in mind, even the youngest and healthiest brewer can’t live the dream.
