Philosophy, Science, and Brewing

What seems like eons ago, I was a philosophy and english major.  At the time, the choice was based on my underlying need to understand the world I existed in.  I was overflowing with questions, and I needed answers.  I was also fed up with multiple choice trick questions, poorly taught high level math classes, and my initial overall pre-med curriculum.  Landing in the arms of philosophy, was like landing in the arms of your mother–you felt safe, and the answers were always available.  Of course, as my college career carried on, these answers only led to more questions, and I was left wanting the stability and tidiness of the formulas of math and science.

What does this have to do with brewing?  As many of you know, brewing has become a slight obsession for me over the past year and a half.  As with all things, I like to take a step back and examine why things are the way they are.  Why did homebrewing fit into my brain so perfectly? It felt like I was designed for it–as if the act of brewing was a perfect form of the thing for which I searched.  I realize I am not alone in this particular phenomenon.  In fact, it is a common occurance.  There is something built into human nature, that allows us to fundamentally identify with the process of brewing.  The knowledge we have learned over the years prepares us percisely for creating the perfect pint.

This idea has been bouncing around my head for awhile now, and as I was reading the first chapter of “A textbook of Brewing” last night, I came across a paragraph that summed up exactly why my philosophical and scientific background meshes with the brewing world:

Brewing technique, therefore, is based partly on well established scientific facts and partly on emperical knowledge gained from years of practical experience. A distinction is frequently drawn in the industry between the theoetical man who tries to explain everything from a scientific point of view, and the practical man who relies on emperical knowledge and experience.

A good brewer should be able to steer a middle course between these two extremes. On the one hand, he should be in a position to make full use of the scientific facts whenever these are available, and on the other, he should be guided by his practical training and feel for the process when dealing with operations which have not yet received a scientific explanation.

When you begin brewing beer, you start off with the idea of how a beer should taste based on your personal experience with that style of beer. After awhile, you begin to accumulate scientific knowledge of how you can make your homebrew taste more like the style goal you are trying to brew, by reading various books and sources. But often times you find yourself without the knowledge needed to fix a particular situation. So what do you do? You start to theorize and philosophize about what could be happening–or what should be happening based on your gut instinct. The knowledge that you gain from this experience will then feed back into the scientific process to match your gut instinct with actual formulaic proof.

As humans we have evolved to adapt to most situations. We are born with a set of assets that allow us to learn the process of scientific method, and we are born with the faculty of memory that allows us to maintain a log of our experiences. By combining the two together, we can process the log every time we are presented with a decision, and make a determination about the proper action. This is a basic human trait. One that is perfect for the art of brewing.