MSU Denver Is Ready to Unveil Its New Charlie Papazian Brewing Education Lab

“This is more experiential than what it used to be,” says Bernardo Alatorre, brewery operations program coordinator and lecturer at Metropolitan State University of Denver, of the school's new brew lab, which is named after Charlie Papazian, a lifetime educator, former longtime president of the Brewers Association, and the most recognizable name in the home-brewing world.

Previously, students could visit and learn about the equipment at the Tivoli Brewhouse on campus but couldn’t actually operate it. Tivoli itself has stopped using that brewhouse, and the potential for another tenant is on the horizon, but no matter what happens, the uncertainty surrounding that situation is less of a factor for the school's brewing program now.

The Charlie Papazian Brewing Education Lab cost approximately $2 million dollars to build, with around 25 percent of that total coming from industry donors, and it will be utilized by three brewing classes at the school this fall.

“This was an excellent fit for my philosophy of learning. They had a much smaller system [before], so now they’ll have a working system the size of a small professional brewery,” Papazian says, adding that this gives students the opportunity to understand the real-life challenges faced by an actual brewery.
The brewing system is from Forgeworks out of Ridgway, and students like Leigh Nelson, who is also the lead brewer at Station 26, are already excited about using it. She reiterates that there are several advantages to the new lab, including an opportunity to learn on equipment that is more similar to systems out in the field. She also notes that the new lab will allow students to better mimic the actual process flow that is utilized in larger facilities, including scheduling and timeliness.

According to Alatorre, the new 3.5bbl (about 108 gallons) system will provide students with the ability to brew professional-sized batches of beer. The Brewery Operations class will make two different batches, applying principles from workload manufacturing in the first, then focusing on process control, process design and cost management in order to optimize the second batch.

A second class, called Sensory Analysis, will brew a batch that is a clone of a commercial recipe. That group will do sensory characterization on the batch, tasting the wort during the brewing process, the beer as it ferments, and then finally the completed product.

Brewing Science and Technologies will be the third class to make use of the new brewing system. That class will look at yeast growth, attenuation, color variation and potentially even bio transformation of the hops.
In addition to the new brewing system, the school is also planning to launch a front-of-house operation. MSU Denver has been working with the City of Denver on permitting, and is currently waiting for final approval from the Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau for its brewpub license, which it expects to get in the next few months.

Nelson notes that this addition will allow students to get unbiased outside responses to their brewing projects. “Critical feedback is one of the most important pieces of information that we receive in the professional field,” she says. “Criticism allows you to review, question and improve your processes, and I’m excited for students to receive more of that."

Alatorre adds that the brewpub license will also give students in the hospitality program hands-on experience in what it’s like to run a brewery from the front-of-house side. He says that the goal is for the brewpub to offer some of the finished beers at a reduced price so that the statistical base of customer feedback can be larger than ever.

MSU Denver also already has a functioning lab run by Katie Strain that opened in April 2019 and services the brewing industry. It's "world-class," Alatorre notes.

The MSU brewing program currently has 39 students enrolled. With the addition of the Papazian Lab, the expectation is to see the program grow in the near future.

Nelson hopes that the addition of the lab will lead to students shaping their own experience as the space develops within the program. “There is so much more to brewery operations than making and tasting beer,” says Nelson. “The scientific, business and creative elements available to students in this program [are large].”

Papazian echoes those sentiments. “Having a broad-based knowledge of all the decision-making processes in the beer business is of real value,” he says. “Even for a marketing person, software engineer or packaging person, just knowing what’s going on throughout the process of making the beer, selling the beer and getting it to the consumer in good condition [is very helpful]. It rounds out your knowledge and helps people make better decisions.”