As you probably gathered from my last post, brewing beer is not an ordinary, nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday kind of job. In fact, if you take your eyes off of it for too long, it’s almost guaranteed that something is going to go wrong.
Now, one thing that can go wrong and always comes up in conversation when I’m talking about beer, is refrigeration. Actually, that’s never happened. Nevertheless, refrigeration and more basically, temperature control, has played a major role in the development and distribution of beer even before modern refrigeration existed. Without delving into history here, suffice it to say we wouldn’t be able to brew beer year round or make many of the beer styles we love without it.
And here is my point. We almost lost some of our wonderful beer this weekend because the machine that controls the temperature of the beer in our tanks was malfunctioning. I discovered this problem on Sunday and after a fair amount of time trying to diagnose the problem, I was forced to admit that I had no idea what the problem was. After first calling, and then writing an email to, the manufacturer on the West Coast, I tried to accept the fact that I would not receive help until Monday, when it would already be too late.
That’s where I was wrong. Not only did the product manager call me back to talk through the issue, but our local service techs also responded to the emergency. Mind you, this was a Sunday, and no one really wants to do anything on Sundays that remotely involves work. Even so, they realized the issue at hand needed to be dealt with and happily performed their respective tasks in order to get us up and running again.
So, here’s to the seldom celebrated technicians, electricians, refrigeration specialists, plumbers and the like (there are too many to mention) that go above and beyond to keep our world running and beer flowing.
Cheers!