Day one on my new career path

As I alluded to a couple of posts back, I've been spending a lot more time this year on a rediscovered passion of mine, so much so, that I have decided to pursue it as a career. And that passion is brewing beer.

I began making beer with my father when I was at university, and continued doing so throughout the remainder of uni and my first career as a software developer. I use the term "making beer", as we were using pre-brewed, concentrated kits and fermenting it from there. This year, I made the switch to all grain beer, which actually involves mashing and brewing the grain and hops as well as fermenting the resulting wort. The all grain method is a lot more time consuming, but you have much more control over the results and you can make beers that are at least as good as a lot of micro-brewery beer.

The task now is to find out how to scale this method up to a commercial level. Whilst I've already done a bit of preliminary research towards this goal, today was my first real day working directly towards it.

Like any first day on the job, there were a lot of unknowns in front of me. My first port of call is to try to line up some work in the industry so I can gain some experience. While there's not a whole lot of opportunities around in Brisbane, I'm confident that I'll be able to find somewhere to get started.

Today I also discovered the brewing courses offered by the University of Ballarat. They have a short course as well as a Graduate Certificate and Graduate Diploma, which is something else to look into. The short course certainly looks like something I'd be keen to do, but I'm told that it isn't being held again until mid next year.