Chris Treanor is the Head Brewer at Qrew Brew, a community-centric brewery in Switzerland. Qrew Brew is an initiative by QoQa, an innovative e-commerce platform. Before entering the industry, Chris trained as a biotechnologist at Dublin City University. He believes this education prepared him for a career in brewing, which combines elements of science, engineering, and business
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Chris Treanor: Civilization exists because of beer. Agriculture exists because of beer.
Dana: Brewing beer is an art and a science that has brought people together for thousands of years.
Micah: But what does the future of this ancient industry look like?
Chris Treanor: People are going to have to think about sustainability in a way that directly affects price and quality and the existence of our jobs as an industry.
Dana: To adapt to an ever changing climate, brewers are exploring everything from perennial heritage grains to novel local ingredients.
Micah: In this episode, we'll dive into the science of brewing and the delicate balance of experimentation in business and explore how important beer has been to the development of culture and community.
Dana: I'm Dana Clemenson
Micah: and I'm Micah Schweitzer. This is Balancing the Future from Mettler Toledo.
Dana: On this show, we'll delve into the world of science and technology and its transformative impact on our lives.
Micah: Let's jump in.
Dana: A Sumerian stone tablet from around 4000 BCE is thought to be the first depiction we have of people and beer. The tablet pictured two individuals with enormous reed straws drinking from a large clay vessel.
Micah: Like at an ancient soda fountain. The ancient Egyptians also brewed throughout their history, and even partially paid laborers with beer rations.
The ancient Greeks saw beer as something that had medicinal properties, and the Incas brewed an impressive 20 types of beer. Long story short, evidence of beer and brewing can be found throughout history and across the world.
Dana: The brewery landscape that we are familiar with today didn't begin emerging until the Middle Ages.
In the West, monasteries and other institutions took over the process, making it more centralized. From there, the slow creep of technological advancement and industrialization globalized brewing. These days, brewing is a multi billion dollar industry, dominated by a few large suppliers.
Micah: As the world has changed, brewing has changed with it, and, as we'll see later, the same is true in reverse.
But let's start at the beginning. How do we actually brew beer?
Chris Treanor: Simply put, the production of a beer takes the cereal, which is malted. And that malting process is kind of like, uh, if the cereal was in the wild or existing in nature, the cereal would fall to the ground. Once rain falls on top of it, the enzymatic activity wakes up in the grain and it starts to grow.
Dana: That's the voice of Chris Treanor, head brewer at Kru Brew. Based in Switzerland, Kru's beers are sold over a unique e commerce platform.
Chris Treanor: Same idea applies to the fabrication of malt. So whenever the process of malting, we, the malter hydrates the grain, the grain starts to grow, and then the process is cut at a certain point so that it keeps the enzymatic activity and to a degree the complex sugars in the grain.
Micah: Each month, Chris Treanor brews six new beers across eight 2, 000 litre tanks.
Chris Treanor: So that whenever I buy it as a brewer, I have this grain that is softer because the malting process has made it softer, which is easier to process, and then once I hydrate those grains that pass by a mill, then those sugars can be converted using the enzymatic activity active in the grains, and those sugars are the sugars that are eventually used by the yeast in the process to make beer.
So we have the malting, brewing, then the process of brewing is split up into different steps. Then the fermentation, when we add the yeast to transform the work that we have produced. And then after the fermentation we have conditioning. And
Micah: is it always the same four base ingredients? Malt, hops, yeast, water?
Chris Treanor: Yes and no. There's a lot of things that you can do with those simple ingredients, but then there's also, especially with the advancement of modern brewing, There's a lot more novel ingredients that are used that can be used for many different things, albeit flavor, efficiency, or just pure experimentation.
So flavor example, we can use many different cereals than barley. So we have oats, we have buckwheat, we have rye, all different purposes and flavors. Not as used as a predominantly as a barley, but there are options there. Then also efficiency. So like the world of hops have changed from, uh, whenever I started majority of the brewers in Ireland and UK, we're still using whole cone flowers.
Now, the standard is pellets, basically, uh, T90 pellets. So basically it reduces a lot of the vegetable charge, which are much easier to process and lots less of wasted beer.
Micah: But you'd always have those four ingredients somewhere in there as a, as a foundation.
Chris Treanor: Exactly. I mean, there's obviously styles of beer that doesn't use hops, for example, because hops is a relatively recent industrialized process that's used in beer.
Before hops, there would have been beers produced with herbal ingredients to kind of keep the stability and shelf life of the beer. Hops as an industry is kind of relatively modern, uh, implication in the industry of beer.
Dana: You might be able to tell that Chris Treanor is speaking to us in a large cement room. He calls this his office cum lab space.
Aside from some office equipment like a printer, this space also contains lab equipment, like a pH meter, density meter, lab balances, and a CO2 monitor.
Micah: Chris Treanor looks right at home in his lab cum office, so it might not surprise you to hear that Chris Treanor is a biotechnologist by training.
Chris Treanor: I think from a very, very young age, I was fascinated by process.
So I grew up on a farm. And that kind of experience of like taking simple things and transforming them into something more functional, more value for use or for sale as an industry. That desire made me suited for biotechnology, I guess. And then, uh, yeah, biotechnology just kind of copper fastened the idea that I would like to make this an industry or make this kind of a career for myself.
When I had the chance of finishing my course in biotechnology and then going directly into running a brewery, it was, yeah, like a match made in heaven.
Micah: Has the process changed at all since you started 12 years ago? I mean, have you always had a lab like this available to you as a brewer?
Chris Treanor: Definitely not as having a lab, but the, the process remains the same, like, uh, the manner of taking the base ingredients and transforming them into beer.
The thing that has changed is that one, there's more competition in the market. There's a lot more smaller breweries. There's a lot more smaller breweries that are becoming bigger and ultimately the consumer is aware of. What good beer tastes like and the quality of that beer. So in order to match those needs and desires, a smaller brewer kind of has to invest in the equipment to be able to guarantee that.
Dana: So let's just, it's a microbrewery that you work for. So what is a microbrewery?
Chris Treanor: I mean, microbrewery is kind of like a term that's applied to the post industrialized world of brewing. Thank you. Before industrialization, every brewery was a microbrewery. Every brewery served their community and existed as part of a center to the community.
And then with industrialization, those breweries got larger, those habits changed, and that basically changed everything regarding brewing. So like in terms of modern microbreweries, I think everything can be dated back to the late 70s, early 80s in America. When we have the likes of anchor steam coming to the market, which kind of changed everything from that kind of seedling of, uh, returning to smaller production, investing in processes, ingredients that are local to there and kind of reinvigorate that kind of locality again.
Micah: Do you have any advantages as a microbrewery with the diversity of products or the level of experimentation that you can indulge in?
Chris Treanor: For sure. I think that's a strong point that we can fast fail with a lot of things. To be innovative, we can brew a small batch of beer. learn from it in a very fast and productive manner.
And if it doesn't work, we can dump it and start again. Uh, whereas the larger brewery doesn't have that flexibility. It's a bit more structured and complicated to be that flexible. Um, so being small definitely has that benefit.
Dana: Chris Treanor thinks that micro breweries have an advantage that the larger brewers don't.
They have the potential to sit in the heart of the community and bring people together.
Micah: They can also have the potential to innovate and focus on local ingredients.
Dana: This leads us to a rapidly growing consumer expectation, sustainability.
Chris Treanor: As a byproduct, every brewer produces CO2, but the irony is every brewer needs CO2 to be able to process the beer afterwards.
Be it adding CO2 into the beer or moving a beer one place to another, a brewer needs in air gas to be able to process the beer. Us being a small brewery, we, uh, produce the CO2 and that goes off into the atmosphere and gets wasted. Basically. Then we have to buy CO2 from another source. to be able to use it.
Whereas now there's more equipment being made available to smaller breweries where they recapture that CO2 that is naturally a byproduct and then reuse it in the process. So it reduces the need for that purchase and reduces the CO2 that gets put out into the atmosphere. So I think that's a big thing that we'll see a lot more smaller breweries invest in in the future.
A big byproduct after that would be the spent grain. So whenever we process the malt, we basically infuse it with water, take out the liquid and all the sugars or the majority of the sugars that we've converted. And what's left is the organic matter, the cereal, which as a brewer doesn't have much value.
But we can find farmers, local farmers, agriculture, that can take that grain and it can be an added additive to their feed for their animals. Or even there's a couple of producers that are using that spent grain and using it as a substrate to grow mushrooms, which is a very interesting thing. Um, and yeah.
Micah: I've seen chips and, like, meat alternatives made out of, uh, brewing by products.
Chris Treanor: I've heard of also a company in France that are using dispensed grain and making a composite for making, uh, furniture, plates, cutlery. Yeah, it's, uh, really interesting.
Micah: Which could make for great furniture for the brew pub, right?
Chris Treanor: Exactly, yeah, yeah.
Micah: What about, um, sourcing? Does that play out locally?
Chris Treanor: So, that's a bit of a thing that's a bit more of a, how do you say it, a challenge. We kind of have to invest in ingredients that often come from further afield. That's kind of a big challenge for Switzerland as well, because we can get Swiss malt, we can get Swiss hops, but the flavor and the quality that we can get there doesn't always match the goals that we need.
Plus, the price for paying local is often 10 times higher than paying from further afield. So it's kind of hard to invest in local. And then, uh, find a sweet spot for, uh, the end consumer. So us being in Switzerland, the majority of our malt will still come from Germany or the UK, then modern consumers, they want a lot of beers that are produced with American hops.
Um, but in terms of sourcing, we've built connections with, uh, American suppliers that have warehouses in Europe. So that way that we know that they transport. A number of times during the year, but it's transported by boat. So when it arrives to Europe, it gets shipped then to us by a road. We know that that's the lowest impact of, um, CO2 impact that we can do.
So, yeah, but, uh, technically or the majority of the time the hops on the malt come from further afield. Beth Dombkowski
Dana: Just curious. So are there farms that their specific product is malt and that's what they do and they grow malt or hops and it's like a kind of factory farm type of situation?
Chris Treanor: It depends.
In countries where there's a rich heritage of, uh, brewing malts, like Germany and the UK, you would have farmers that will grow varieties that are solely for those uses. In other countries, maybe like France, and to a good degree Germany, you would have a lot more farmers that might, uh, be a bit more diverse and, okay, this field is for malting grain, this field is for farm and feed.
There's a bit more vast like that, but um, yeah, I think it's more in the countries where it has a richly steeped tradition of malt producing that you have farmers specializing in that. And then you also have the malting facilities, the malteries that have their own, some of them have their own farms and so on and so forth.
Micah: Do the ingredients that you source drive the recipes you develop or is it the other way around?
Chris Treanor: Typically the other way around. So, um, the brewery that I'm at right now, I benefit in the sense that we don't have a core range. So every month we put out six new beers, six new recipes, but that's planned in advance.
So say I have at least the next five months pipeline pre planned. Um, so that allows me a lot of flexibility to work on the recipe and to find the ingredients. It's in advance so that we can be, uh, as efficient so on so forth, but the recipe often drives the ingredients. I mean, it does work both ways sometimes, but principally for new, for us, the recipe drives the ingredients.
So say for example, in the last few weeks I brewed, uh, a rice lager kind of inspired by a Japanese style brewing and we collaborated with a chef on there and this rice lager used it. Corgi rice. So basically we, uh, took a bit of the process from sake producing and apply that into beer producing. So that demanded us finding a rice, us finding the Koji, us finding the malt and everything that worked with it and also the hops, so that took a lot of planning in advance to know where everything was coming from and also to balance the price because we were very close to buying the rice from Switzerland, but that was.
It's literally 10 times more expensive than buying the rice, which we ended up finding in Italy because the agricultural ground in Switzerland is a lot different than a lot of other European countries. And what's it taste like? It's very interesting. Still in like, um, how do you say the early stages? And it's always hard to taste from the tank on how it converts to the final product.
But I'm obviously biased in the sense that I'm very interested and very proud of how it's tasting by so far.
Micah: You mentioned earlier that you can test things and throw them out if they don't work out. But obviously you need, as a business, you need a certain amount of what you do to work out. How do you guarantee a level of quality when you're creating six new beers every month that are designed to be sold?
Chris Treanor: So I think the biggest challenge for quality for us was yeast health. So I try to work with liquid cultures as much as possible. So initially buying from a lab or a source, a liquid pitch, and then use that for multiple generations to get the best fermentation, best flavor possible. So we're coming up to nearly a hundred brews since I've started the brewery here, which is just over a year old.
And out of that hundred brews, we've thrown out maybe three or four and all of those problems have been related to yeast. And primarily yeast that gets stuck at a customs or post office for a day or two longer than it should have. But we were able to figure that out, that it was problematic at an early point.
Because it costs less the earlier you find it. Because we find out that we have an issue in the cans. We've already invested in everything to get to that point. And then having to dump a can is a lot more complicated than having to dump a can. a batch earlier on.
Dana: How do you identify the problems?
Chris Treanor: So mainly flavor is a big thing.
So having an idea of, uh, what that wort or beer should taste at a certain point, that's a big indicator. And then, uh, kind of just the performance of the yeast, if it's very slow to start. That's a orange to red flag. And if it doesn't finish as in consume the sugars that you expected it to finish, that's also a big issue.
Either we have to intervene, add another yeast and fix it, or we cut our losses at an early point and start again and try to recoup the last time as quick as possible.
Micah: And are you using your, your lab equipment to check these processes?
Chris Treanor: Yeah, so basically my, uh, tool that gets used every day or two tools that gets used every day is the, uh, density meter.
So that gives me a reference point at the start of brewing and throughout the process of how the sugars are being consumed. As the sugars are consumed, the density lowers, therefore the alcohol increases. Okay. So I'm able to calculate how much alcohol that beer is going, uh, arriving with. And also before I start the production, I have an idea of how much the potential conversion of sugars can be done.
So if I'm out of range on that process, I know that there's something wrong. And also the second device is the pH meter that gets used at basically every point in the production of brewing. And that kind of gives a indication of how the word production goes. So I have parameters and ranges set for each recipe style.
And then during the fermentation, because the yeast is active, it changes the pH during production. So we know, uh, at this first 24 hours of production, the yeast is going through an exponential growth phase. So we expect a certain pH change depending on the recipe at that point. And then once it goes past that exponential growth phase.
The pH will actually keep continue going down and then it'll go down to a point. And, uh, yeah, that's technically, uh, or that's for us like the, um, an indication of how well the fermentation is going and when we're in parameters as well.
Dana: Brewing is more than an art and a science. As we said at the start of the episode, beer has been part of our global culture for thousands of years.
Micah: But what role does beer play in our modern world?
Chris Treanor: A big thing for me is the. community. So I think that that idea of, uh, bringing people together, sharing good moments, good discussion, everything like that. Civilization exists because of beer. Agriculture exists because of beer. So we have a lot to thankful for beer.
Like, uh, it kind of brings us together as a society. I remember the first home brew beer that I ever did. I was like fascinated by the process, but going forward from that. When I found something that I was proud to share, sharing that with people, that's something energetic and electric that's never left me.
The idea of sharing with people and bringing people together to taste something. So I think the beer itself is a big, uh, uniter. I think that's a big thing for me. that we need to keep keep going in terms of beer.
Dana: Is there anything, what changes do you predict in the industry in the next say five, ten, twenty years down the line?
Chris Treanor: I think people are going to have to think about sustainability in a way that directly affects price and quality and the existence of beer. offer jobs as an industry. I know of a lot of advancements in terms of, uh, what grains people are using. So there's like, um, novel grains, well, novel to brewing grains that have been existed as a parallel to civilization.
So you have grains like Fonio coming from West Africa. Kernza coming, I think, basically, uh, based in Europe and West Africa as well. So when we talk about barley, typically that's planted, harvested, planted, harvested, uh, depending on the variety, you can have spring and winter varietals, whereas, um, Kernza, it's a perennial grain, which is really interesting for farmers and for grain qual or soil quality because rather than being planted and harvested and planted and harvested.
It's which compacts the soil. This perennial grain grows deep roots, which really helps with the nutrition of the soil and of like basically what we should be thinking of as a, an industry that is impacted by agriculture. I think there's a big movement towards returning to bear variety barleys. So typically coming from, um, Scotland.
So this is an older land race, uh, variety that I have only from brewers that I know that have used it can only say good things about it. So I'm interested in seeing how that's going to impact. what grains we're going to use, what varieties we're going to use coming forward in the next five, 10 years. And then after that, really interesting to see how brewers invest in the future, because I think the future of brewing, it's not going to be just more efficient.
It's not going to be just the flavor. It's going to be how we invest in the community, how we invest in growing the benefit of beer, bringing people together, creating events, so on and so forth, building community. I think that's going to be a big thing that Is integral to beer staying around and being a vital industry for humanity.
Micah: What about, um, speaking of different grain varieties. So with the heritage grains you're saying that in some cases this can mean a return to sort of more local varietals? Mm hmm. What about climate resistance with various grains?
Chris Treanor: I mean, there's a lot of varieties that just won't work with the way the climate has changed.
But there's a lot of varieties that are a bit more robust than we give them credit. So it's, uh, I mean, there's going to be a deal of trial and error to find how things come together. But I think it's interesting, uh, to see certain land race and heritage varieties actually thrive. in the locality that they should be grown in.
Dana: Chris Treanor, is there anything else that we haven't mentioned about brewing, about science and innovation that you think our listeners should know about?
Chris Treanor: I think if anything, this discussion, I hope, uh, you arrive to your next, uh, local brewery, local bar and talk with people, ask for a bit of advice, leave your zone of comfort because you can find some really interesting flavors.
And I think the, the history of beer, like the history of how a recipe comes to existence and become part of. what we exist as brewing as an industry. I think that's a, an incredible thing. And there's some really interesting stories of how recipes come to be through, uh, societal changes through industrialization.
I think there's, if in another world, I would probably study brewing more in an anthropological kind of manner than through production, because I think there's a really an interesting story to be told through beer as well.
Micah: One of the things that strikes me is so interesting as we're talking is you mentioned that we have beer to thank for civilization.
Essentially, I guess what people realize that naturally occurring beer was tasty. And then that if we started agricultural methods of production, we could guarantee that we had this tasty thing on hand.
Chris Treanor: Yeah,
Micah: that's the, is that how it worked?
Chris Treanor: I mean, I can't speak for how it actually worked, but I think there's, there's a strong point of, uh, Early civilizations setting the roots around planting barley for flour, for bread making, and for beer production.
So I think, yeah, that's a big point of where we exist today as a civilization. We can say thanks to beer for a big degree of that.
Micah: And it's fascinating to me that you can have something that's so old that goes all the way back to the dawn of agriculture. And at the same time, hearing you speak, I don't see a limit to the innovation that's still ahead of us.
Chris Treanor: Yeah. I mean, even when we speak of how we use yeast, like a few hundred years ago, yeast wasn't even considered an ingredient. I think brewers back in the day didn't know that it was yeast that was transforming a beer. Yeah. Yeah. They would have a stick that they would mix the fermentation with. And it was like, if I mix the beer with this stick, good things happen.
If I don't mix the fermentation, I don't inoculate it with the yeast that's present on the wood, the beer doesn't happen. So it kind of. Exists as a cultural thing. So like culturally speaking, I've done it this way and it become, I get good things out of it only recently in terms of we talk ancient times of beer.
Only recently have we been able to apply science to it through the industrialization of hop farms, Louis Pasteur and his pasteurization. That's how we got towards using specific yeasts for a beer production. So like we're still very much in early days of using scientific process in beer compared to how long beer has been around us.
So who knows what the future will hold because innovation can happen very fast.
Micah: One more question that we ask, uh, all our guests on the show, Chris Treanor, is advice for people who are up and coming in their careers, or perhaps who are thinking about career options. You have a science background, um, you're a brewer.
What advice would you have to someone who's starting out in the sciences when it comes to a space for them potentially in the brewing industry?
Chris Treanor: So before getting into the industry, I think it's very important to. Brew at home, brew with friends and kind of like a feel that side of things because I think a big driving factor is to have the passion for this kind of process for this kind of area.
And then if you feel the fire is there to advance, there's a lot of like study programs that you can go in the brewing world or to really feel it because you really have to be driven to live in the world of brewing. It's a mixture of. Chef, it's a mixture of science, it's a mixture of maintenance, engineering, fixing everything.
Everything breaks at the most inopportune times. You have to deal with a lot of stress and problem solving. Um, but I think if you're really interested in getting the foot in the door, go to your local brewery and say, I want to spend a day cleaning kegs. If you can spend a day cleaning kegs, say, I'll be here next week, I'll do the same.
And slowly build it, and uh, maybe that'll be like the foot in the door to trying your first brew, so on and so forth. But it really depends on, I guess your locality and what way the brewing industry is growing around you, but I think a good place to start is brewing at home and learn from that.
Dana: We've been speaking with Chris Treanor Traynor, head brewer at Crew Brew. Micah, what were some of your biggest takeaways from the conversation?
Micah: I was really struck with how back to the roots Chris Treanor's approach with micro brewing is, that there's this real emphasis on community, brewing in a community, creating community around the brewing, and of course also this move towards sourcing local ingredients when possible.
Dana: Yeah, I thought it was really interesting when he talked a little bit about conventionally how they get ingredients and how they're shipped. From all over the world, they didn't know that, so it was interesting to learn.
Micah: And yet there's so many areas in which micro brewing draws from and has learned from the larger industrial scale brewing process.
Dana: Yeah, with all of the quality control and their highly sub scientific processes.
Micah: Exactly, like all the lab equipment that's sitting in Chris Treanor's office. Um, you know, and so at first, I guess I was surprised that somebody with a biotechnology background would land in brewing. It seems like a, an interesting career trajectory, but in the end, perhaps it's not so surprising after all.
Dana: Yeah, I think from what we learned, it absolutely makes sense.
This has been Balancing the Future from Mettler Toledo.
Micah: What questions about science and technology do you want answered in a future episode?
Dana: Let us know by leaving a review or if you're a Spotify user in the comment section.
Micah: And be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Dana: We'll be back in two weeks with our next episode.
See you then.
