Having been a fairly decent homebrewer for close to a decade now, I’ve often thought about what it would take to go pro. Anyone have any ideas about that, and more to the point, (and more GQ) how much would a brewmaster at a brewpub make? at a regional microbrew?
bump, and
Do breweries typically mash all the grain themselves, or do they use extract?
Do you mean how much money, or how much beer?
At any rate, one of my roommates is an assistant brewer at a brewpub. This evening I’ll ask him for you.
Just to get started, from 1995
The local brewpub has 500 gallon vats (16 barrel) on display in shiny stainless, but I never see them in use. Since making 1000 barrels would require more than 1 run a week, I expect they keep their real brew operations off-premises.
they definitely mash the grain themselves.
It partially depends on the size of brewery and the level of brewmaster. This is a field with a lot of DOE. Steve Dressler at Sierra Nevada makes a good chunk of change for his expertise, and he deserves it. Most of these guys have degrees in microbiology and or brewing science. They aren’t just the local drunks.
The people I know personally at Butte Creek (the much, much smaller local brewery) are mostly microbiology majors or graduate students. While their pay is not monumental, the other job perks certainly are. Plus the experience they gain here can help them land higher level brewmaster jobs that do, in fact, pay a lot more.
On a quasi-related note, drink the Butte Creek organic porter. It’s magical
Sorry for being obtuse, I meant salary-wise. Altough production levels are interesting, too.
I found cites on Google ranging from 50-70k, as an average. As NunOfTheAbove strongly implies, everybody I know at the local brew co also gets “fringe benefits”, so to speak.
Sierra Nevada gives all their employees something like a case of beer / week, even employees who just work in the restaurant or gift shop. I tend to end up with at least a couple of them in class every semester and they generally have enough free beer to go around.
I also talked to one of the brewery “tasters” today. They are essentially a lesser version of a brewmaster. He made ~40K annually from freelance and now makes ~30K working in one of the small breweries in Utah.