The Beer Industry Program at Metropolitan State University (MSU) Denver isn’t traditional. For one, the average age in the roughly 90 student program is 26. Many of its attendees are first-generation college students, or veterans who use their GI Bill on the program.
“They know what they don’t want in life,” said Scott Kerkmans, director of the Beer Industry Program. “That’s often a harder question than what you want.”
And of course, how many undergraduates have the chance to major in beer?
While the program has chemistry and biology professors, it also has engineering professors, business professors and hospitality professors, giving students a holistic beer education. During their time at the university, students have the opportunity to work at Tivoli Brewing Company, Colorado's oldest brewery and the country’s largest brewery that’s also on a college campus.
“During any given week, we have our students brewing on small, half barrel systems,” said Kerkmans. “That allows them to experiment without wasting money. In more advanced classes, they get to brew on the Tivoli brewery pilot system, and eventually the full system.”
Recently, MSU Denver’s program took a huge leap forward because of a donation by Cask, a Canadian canning system manufacturer that was instrumental in helping craft beer jump from bottles to cans.
“Fifteen years ago, the aluminum can was the most scorned packaging that a craft brewer could’ve used,” said Marty Jones, former employee at Oskar Blues Brewery and current spokesman for Cask. “It was a brown bottles-only trade.”
Today, it’s the other way around. Many of the breweries that started packaging beer in the '90s still put beer in bottles, but cans have become far more popular. As Jones explained, “Cans are the ultimate package for craft beer.” They provide complete protection from light and oxygen, which result in rapid degradation of the product. About a third of the weight of a bottle of beer is the bottle itself, so cans allow a producer to get more beer into a truck. And cans are welcome in places bottles aren’t.
“The beach, the pool, the bathtub,” Jones said. “And cans are infinitely recyclable.”
As an example of the way that cans have penetrated the beer market, Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, Maine, recently shocked the brewing world by announcing that they’d put their flagship beer, Allagash White, into cans for the first time since the company was founded in 1995.
The donation from Cask included a $60,000 Micro-Automated Canning System (MACS), as well as about $15,000 of extras. Cask flew staff out to Colorado to set up the machine and train people on how to operate it. After seeing Cask’s donation, a company called Pack Leader USA added another $35,000 in the form of a labeler that fits right onto Cask’s line.
Between Cask and Pack Leader, the donation totaled $115,942, and puts MSU Denver at the forefront of beer industry education.
“Although we’re one of the larger universities in the state, we’re the least well-funded,” said Kerkmans. “Because we want to keep tuition low, we have to think out of the box.”
Currently, Tivoli Brewing pays The Beer Industry Program to use their equipment, and the program recently started offering lab services to the beer industry at a competitive rate.
For those interested in a beer major, MSU Denver offers two different bachelor degrees, one in Brewery Operations and the other in Craft Brewing and Pub Operations. They also have a certificate and a minor.
