Brewer

Henry Budd

Here’s a line in work that’s well worth raising your glass to.

It’s not unusual for an undergraduate to enjoy a schooner or two, but for Malt Shovel brewer Andrew Morgan-Jones it was during his Mechanical Engineering degree at the University of NSW that he became very serious about beer.

Morgan-Jones says setting up the university’s home-brew society was the first step in his career.

“We were originally trying to make VB and Toohey’s New [styles of beer] and we quickly realised there were a lot more styles,” he says.

“From second year university onwards, it was just a case of exploring bottle stores and trying to find exciting beers.”

At the end of the degree, Morgan-Jones decided to pursue a brewing career. On a tour of the Malt Shovel brewery he met manager Robert Freshwater, who suggested he study brewing at the University of Ballarat.

“You learn about the chemistry of making beer, so going from raw materials all the way through to fermentation to the finished product,” he says.

“Each step involves a fair bit of science in terms of how the malt, yeast, and hops interact to form the flavour.”

When he was halfway through the course, which he studied by correspondence, Morgan-Jones was offered a job at the Malt Shovel.

“Being a small brewery, we have still control over the process so every day you are utilising your brewing-science background and having to make decisions on the run,” he says.

Each brewing day – which is 16 hours – produces 12,000 litres of beer.

“In a normal brewing day you’ve got brewing in the brew house and cellar operations,” Morgan-Jones says.

It involves taking the raw materials and putting them together at the right temperature and quantities.

“In the cellar the person is involved in removing yeast from old tanks that are no longer being used, and then filtering the beers … and getting the beer to the right alcohol and carbonation levels,” he says.

As well as making the beer, it’s also the brewer’s job to taste it and understanding the palate is vital to identifying the faults and attributes of a beer.

“We taste it before we filter and then after. The beer has to be signed off by two approved tasters before it can be released,” he says.

“Everybody at Malt Shovel goes through a course to become part of the taste panel.”

There are more than 45 different types of beers and once a month the brewers experiment using a 600 litre micro-brewery.

“The ultimate is making a beer from scratch which you know is going to be good,” he says.

“You make a small batch, it tastes quite good – and you just blow the recipe up into a larger size.”