Beer Smart | A-B Tech's Craft Beverage Institute

Tourism officials want people to think of Asheville as Beer City, USA. Never mind that breweries now dot the downtowns of even the smallest of cities. Still, there are only a handful of schools in the country like Craft Beverage Institute of the Southeast, on the campus of A-B Tech.

Today, we talk with Jeff “Puff” Irvin, the institute’s director. Every semester, people from throughout the South and far beyond study at the Craft Beverage Institute, many pursuing a career change. While the school teaches the facets of winemaking and distilling the gamut of spirits, this conversation largely focuses on beer. We talk about Irvin's approach to training tomorrow’s professionals in an industry under constant evolution and competition.

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Transcript

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: We actually have students from all over the world. We're super unique in a community college system because I've had a student from Russia, a student from Korea. I've got students from all over the United States looking for this program. They move here, take their two year degree. Sometimes they stick around and they learn and they work.

Other times they go to Vietnam and I have a student that graduated is now working at Asaki Kara in Vietnam, making Saki. So it's an international program at a community college in Western North Carolina. So it is unique. 

Matt Peiken: Who and why was that conceived to happen here? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: So Asheville, North Carolina, for those that folks that don't know, we cannot throw a rock and not hit a brewery. There's over 40 in the Asheville area. In Buncombe County, there's way more than that. I can't keep track of them. We have the most visited winery in the world. In the Biltmore.

Matt Peiken: What? The most visited winery in the world is in the Biltmore? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Yes. 

Matt Peiken: There's something sad about that in a way, because there are some amazing wineries in places like Napa and 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Sure. Yes, of course.

And actually, truth be told and Biltmore will tell you this, some of their grapes are grown in Napa. And so what the other anus is there's craft distilleries, there's nine hard cideries. There's a bunch of beautiful wineries. Just in Henderson County alone. We operate in this kind of mecca of craft beverage, right?

So when I was hired 10 years ago, The program actually started in August of 2013. The two really brilliant minds behind this, Sheila Tillman and Scott Adams were working at AB Tech at the time, and they had this idea where they could see the growth in the industry, the growth in the tourism, and they had this vision of starting a program.

Now they built the program with. Titles and maybe some classes and things, and got it approved through the state, but they didn't have an instructor. They hired me. I was the first instructor hired back in August of 2013, as was basically my start date. And I hit the ground running and created the curriculum, the classes, the core of the everything that we do here.

Matt Peiken: Talk about that a little bit because it's one thing to have a thriving industry. It's another to develop an entire curricula around that. What were some elements that you thought were intrinsic to have in an educational program that people might not think go frontline with a career in the beer industry.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: So when you think craft beverage people think people sitting around and drinking. I would argue that this is a very STEM program and I even go so far as to say STEAM— science, technology, engineering, art and math. To make a still work, to make a winery work, to make a brewery work, there is going to be a lot of engineering.

There's going to be a lot of nerdy science. So when we look at the math that goes in behind it, the thermodynamics fluid flow, it's manufacturing. It's manufacturing at its core.

Raw material coming in, product going out, transportation, logistics, marketing, public relations. You've got an HR department, you know, as, as you get bigger and bigger in these companies, you have all of these pockets that just encompass all the things that people do. And so when they started this program, they could see the growth in the industry.

They could see the growth of what we had here in supplying workers, supplying people to work in these production facilities. Our program is heavily based on hands-on learning. You can read a book on how to drive a car. That doesn't mean I'm gonna give you my keys. 

Matt Peiken: I remember decades ago when there were a big home brewing, push craft, brewing push. People weren't thinking of careers in that way. They just wanted to make beer. 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: This is what I saw, in the seventies kind of thing, people would go over to Europe and they would try these amazing things that had been brewed for 200 years.

They come here and they couldn't have that. So then they started making it and then people were like I want some of that. That's amazing. And so that's where the craft brewery boom, with the founding fathers of this industry had started these little small breweries and then people snowball it into some of these giant facilities that we know and brands that we know and love today. So the diversification of flavor has been brought, I think, from people traveling and education and now we have all this information at our fingertips. We can learn about something in such a short amount of time.

What you can't learn is how to smell, taste, and do. You can read about anything, but when you physically have to do it, it's a different thing. 

Matt Peiken: So give us a sense of where education was in this industry before the founding of this institute and how it's evolved.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: So I have an undergraduate degree in biology. Then great question. What do you do with a biology degree? If you haven't specialized, it's a pretty general thing. I went down to the University of California Davis and graduated from the Master Brewers Program there. There's another institute in Chicago that's pretty old called the Siebel Institute that trained brewers as well.

It's traditionally been an apprentice sort of thing in Europe. Certainly now there's more formalized training, more formalized schooling and people are learning at compacting some of this stuff that they would learn over years of training to a shorter amount of time. For instance, our two year degree.

That being said, I think that there's a lot of industries, which I think that have gotten away from the internship apprenticeship kind of program that really could benefit from going back to something like that. 

Matt Peiken: I guess what fascinates me and what I'm curious about is, there was a beer industry that was developing before the development of this institute? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: They've been drinking beer for like 5,000 bc. 

Matt Peiken: But were people viewing it as a career in the same way? You were talking about now there's 40 plus breweries in this region, not to mention wineries, other distilleries.

What has happened to make it a career pursuit that maybe even in the early 2000s, people weren't thinking of this industry as a career pursuit to train for?

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: I think if you went to school as a chemical engineer, I think that getting a job at Budweiser was a big deal. I do. Or Miller, Coors, any of those, I mean, that's where they're starting off at. 

Matt Peiken: Those were the optimal 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: destinations.

If you were a chem major what more fun would it be to work at one of those giant breweries? And it's chemical engineered, it's finest. Okay. You think about the sheer volume that those companies can put out and process Jack Daniels, the amount of barrels that they put down in a day. Is staggering.

Matt Peiken: But they're the same day one as they are in year 10. Year 20. Those products don't change. Where is the challenge in that for a chemical engineer? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Oh my. That's the hardest thing to do. 

Matt Peiken: You mean the consistency is?

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Yes. Every year you have this agricultural based product, whether it's barley or hops or the wine industry's got it a little bit more figured out 'cause they sell it as a vintage, whiskey.

Any of these things, if you have a beer. Miller Lite. If you have it here in Asheville or you have it in Sri Lanka, it's going to taste the same. They're using completely different grain bases, so that barley that grows is going to change. Then it goes through a malting process. Then it goes through a brewing process.

The fact that they can make it the same, wow. And that's, it's not about brewing 50 or 60 different styles of beer. If your flagship is your flagship. Me as a consumer has an expectation for it to taste the same as it did last time. 

And that's what I guess my naivete thinking. You can have a granular formula on paper, but the ingredients inherently change.

Every season and the thing about beer is we brew it all year round whiskey all year round. Wine is a little bit different. We press the grapes, we start to ferment them, and they're released as a vintage. And so that's a little bit smarter. 'cause the consistency you're giving way to the fact that this growing season, mother nature has gave us more rain or less rain, or the grapes struggled more, or there was a fungus that came through.

The there, the way that the process these things to even make them the same is. Is really the challenge. 

Matt Peiken: So you talked about if you were a chemical engineer, major 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: graduate back in, early nineties, right? 

Matt Peiken: So now who are you drawing? Who are your students? What angles are they coming from? Because it's not just chemical engineer majors. No. 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: No. I'm getting students from first of all, all over the planet with just the craziest backgrounds. The majority of my students already have a four year degree. 

Matt Peiken: So talk about, you went through the UC Davis Master Brewers Program. Master Brewers Program. But obviously things have evolved and changed. What did you feel you had to bring to this program to start that maybe the school, let alone students would not have thought about?

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: So I graduated from uc, Davis. I was a brewer. I ran a brewery for 10 years commercially. I knew that the students wanted to brew on commercial sized equipment, and that was important because if you're brewing on a five gallon system that has a direct fire, element under it, it's not the same as brewing at 300 gallons with steam. 

Matt Peiken: When you've seen the expansion to ginger beer and these other spirits that maybe 10, 15 years ago weren't topical, has the program had to evolve and grow. And if so, talk about how things you're teaching now and elements of the curricula here that 10 years ago weren't on your palette.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Well, seltzer hard. Seltzer. Six years ago nobody was talking about it, and it's an alternative beverage. Some of us out there may be old enough to remember like Bartles and James wine coolers. 

Matt Peiken: Oh my God. Anybody who was a teen in the eighties, terrible. 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Go to the nineties, ZEMA. These are alternative beverages. These are basically the original seltzers. They were taking a beer base. They were filtering 'em. They were making a very clear Mike's Hard Lemonade. These four Loco even 

Matt Peiken: do remember Boone's Farm? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Do I remember Boone? Boone's Farm is an interesting conundrum because some of it is malt based and some of it's actually wine based.

Huh? So that's an interesting one because 

Matt Peiken: but it was all headache based. 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Oh, a hundred percent. Okay. Exactly. 'cause I remember vaguely that was not something that most people consumed in moderation. 

Matt Peiken: No. It was designed to be chugged. But you're talking about the evolution of these spirits that seltzer 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: seltzer was a big thing that we'd never even thought. Thought would cross our curriculum, but now it's a integral part of what we teach to make sure that people can make these these products and make them consistent.

Again, do your, and be able to get about to the shelf. 

Matt Peiken: Do your facilities here at the school, do you have to add or change equipment or augment your equipment to accommodate different kinds of spirits? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: It's not only the equipment, but it's also the testing equipment, right? So as we've expanded what we do, we have to make sure on the quality control, quality assurance wise, that we have equipment to test that.

We have some things where we can run cider wine, beer, and spirits through this machine, and it will spit out the alcohol percentage and how much residual sugars inside of it. So even the students have diversified on what they wanna make.

For something we call the capstone. The capstone is this anticipas of everything you've taught, been taught, and they have to basically present a beer, wine, cider spirit, a product that they've made here to a group of industry professionals after their second year, right? And they sit down and we call it like a drink tank, like a riff on Shark Tank, right?

So we sit around, they present this product, they have to present a business plan, they have to present a marketing plan, and then these local professionals crush their dreams. Really? Yeah, they honestly, these guys and gals that have been working out in the industry that have been doing this for years, maybe have already tried this, and they're like, here, we're gonna save you money.

Here's why this isn't gonna work here. It may work where you're thinking about it, but it didn't work here when we tried it 15 or 20 or five or six years ago. 

Matt Peiken: When you're talking about it works or doesn't work, how much of this is the actual taste and the content of the beverage itself? Versus how much of it is the marketing, the packaging, the branding, the selling of this.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: So back in the nineties, I would say if you build it, they will come no more. The consumer is way more educated than they ever have been about taste. They're more responsible with what they're putting in their body, and I think that is the baseline, and you have to have quality, you have to have consistency.

Once you get that, then you can start spending that money to tell people about it because if you're, if you have this expectation of a product and someone comes in and the second time it's different. If it's not, if it's supposed to be the same product, they're gonna know right away because the consumer is more educated about anything that has to do with craft more.

More so now than ever because of the apps, because of the internet, because of the enthusiasm for these products that has been built over the course of, the craft beverage industry. 

Matt Peiken: Now there's one thing about selling it at retail, there's another about competing among breweries locally.

The tourist dollar, local dollars. Yeah. What draws people to your brewery versus your competitor's brewery? Do you go into that element in your course too? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: So when they are going to pick their internship. We tell them your homework is to go drink in moderation, but you go drink, you find the culture, the fit, the vibe, how things are going in these different facilities.

'cause each one kind of not say they had their niche, but you're going to feel more comfortable working for X because of the products that they make that you enjoy. You like the way that their logo looks, you like the way that their artwork is. You see Other people around the facility that are more closely related to what you know, like you just get that feel, that vibe. 

Matt Peiken: All of those things you're talking about.

Are not to do a taste done. They're all that's really interesting. And you just said a moment ago, it used to be if you build it, they will come. That's no longer the case. And I wonder, you don't see often, but it happens very occasionally. A brewery will close here. 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: And and that's an interesting thing too 'cause what we've seen now is some of these original brewers the forefathers of this whole industry movement, they are getting to retirement age. And if they don't have a succession plan, they don't have a child that wants to take over the family business. They don't have any really way to move on from it.

That I am also seeing. So there could be this, if you don't have the quality or Covid killed a lot of 'em just with funding. If you were caught right in a big expansion and you had this giant outlay of cash and you couldn't recoup that money over covid there, there was some financial hardship for a lot of folks.

Matt Peiken: Are we talking about local breweries or are we talking nationwide? Nationwide. Nationwide. Not, people who were trying to sell at retail or you're talking about entities that were dependent on people visiting their facility?

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Both. Okay. Both. 'cause if you expanded into packaging and retail, you have laid down a lot of cash for packaging equipment, for personnel, for labels. And if you think about all of it, the design work that's coming with the self adhesive label that's going on, a can or a bottle or even the six pack holder and then the case box that goes into, and then they are gonna be shipped in large quantities.

So now you have, so you've. Outlayed all this cash for then a diminished sales that happened potentially over that time where no one could really go anywhere, right? The margins at your tap room or at your facility are always the highest. You're not paying a distributor you're basically selling right off the tip that went away.

And so if you were, that was your business model where you know you want to drive traffic to your tasting room, that's gonna help you sell merchandise, that's gonna help hats and t-shirts. That's that walking billboard of the folks that are leaving. You lost that. And that was the highest margin.

And then if you didn't have a way to can or sell beer to go or have that opportunity for someone to take a piece of that with them when you couldn't be open. How did you generate any revenue?

Matt Peiken: I guess it depends on ambition, right there you can be the king of local tap rooms or the queen of local tap rooms and do just fine. So the tap rooms that have revived and come back strong. What have been the factors involved in that? Are you seeing. Some strong tap rooms who maybe pre covid weren't as strong, who have used the post covid time to either recalibrate and make something of themselves in a bigger way.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Sure. I think, that time was introspective for a lot of folks. What can we do? What can we do better? We know it's not gonna last forever. How can we capture folks coming back in here? Not everyone's gonna like beer.

Not everyone's gonna like wine. Not everyone's gonna want to drink X. So if we diversify, not only what we're making, and that's what I'm seeing mostly right now, 

Matt Peiken: there's a couple things of diversification that come up to me. One is the kinds of beers you're actually serving. And I wanna get to both elements, but let's talk about diversification of styles of beer.

Okay? And. I personally, think IPAs are the biggest scam in beer. Okay. A company like Burial, for instance, burial Brewing. They'll have four or five IPAs on tap, not one American Pale Ale, not one wheat beer. 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Do you know why they do that? Why? Because they sell. What is that?

There are people that are looking for those styles of beer. They actually have a dark Czech lager on right now that is unbelievably good. A former student that works there. He dropped a can off the other day, and I had it. And it was fantastic. 

Matt Peiken: I guess it's an acquired taste. I don't get, everybody's taste is different and I totally allow that. But when you see these beers that have these really high IBU

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: number, international bitterness, 

Matt Peiken: you mean? Yes. That they're intentionally really bitter 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: people that enjoy those beers, I always call 'em sadomasochist. Bitter in biology translates to poison. So your child, your loved ones, when you were little, you probably didn't like Brussels sprouts.

You probably didn't like broccoli, you probably didn't like asparagus. Those are big, pungent and sometimes bitter foods, right? You have half as many taste buds as you did when you were little and you've trained yourself to diversify some of the flavors, tastes and smells that you enjoy. 

Matt Peiken: So you're saying people have developed a taste for poison? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: You don't see a lot of very young people drinking like very heavily peated 21-year-old Scotch one 'cause it's expensive. But two, it's just a huge flavor. Elderly people salting their food way more. They have the sensory recognition of what that's supposed to taste like.

The sodium chloride helps bring more of that flavor to their palate to accentuate the flavors that they knew it was. 

Matt Peiken: So you're saying these IPAs. Have that 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: baked in. 

So the International Bitterness Unit it's a chemical that is translated. It's a summarized alpha acid that comes from the hops.

It comes from the manufacturing process. What's the first beer you had? Probably a domestic style lager you stole from your parents? 

Matt Peiken: Yes, I remember Lowenbraus and Henry Weinhart.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: yeah. 

Matt Peiken: And then not having enough money for that and having to go down to Natural Light and Lucky 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Lagger. 

Yeah. So those are, that's when you're introduced with beer. Natural light is not devoid of flavor, but it's gonna be a little bit on the sweeter side. It has a 50% corn, 50% barley.

It's going to be light in flavor. It's gonna be that introduction. Beer intrinsically is bitter because of the hops that are put in it. Not a lot of hops in natural light. Now as you evolved as a drinker, I've seen people get introduced to that domestic style lager and then they start looking for something a little bit malty.

So they look at like Amber Bach or the original fat tire, something that had a little bit more malt backbone. And then they go full circle to crazy IPAs, like they're looking for the hoppiest beers. They can. Once they achieve that, then they go to the next step and people jump on and off on this train.

But in general this is what I've seen. They go to the IPA and then they want to go to these strange far off regions, like these crazy Belgians and fruited beers and single releases, and people that put like shoe leather in the beer and you have to wait in line for 'em. Is that a thing? No, but it, now that being said, mezcal, which is a beautiful spirit from Mexico traditionally was aged in a, in, some of it was aged in a leather bag.

Matt Peiken: I was wondering about the IPA craze. I marvel that there are people who swear by them and that there are breweries in town. Burial among them are tap rooms in town that have a preponderance of, it isn't one IPA enough or two, they have to have four or five on the menu.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: I just I think it's brilliant 'cause people are buying 'em, I guess. so keep making 'em. 

Matt Peiken: Here's the second strand of diversification that I've noticed is having elements of your taproom that aren't about the beer and going back to burial. They recently opened a concert facility called Eulogy. I went to a show there.

Really nice, small, intimate room. How do you see those non-beer or nons spirit elements of a tap room becoming important to the success of a tap room? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: I think diversifying the opportunity for someone to stay there for a longer period of time and enjoy maybe two or three beers.

So if it's a sports bar, they got a tv. So you have a. Ton of different games on the music venues like Rabbit Rabbit next to Asheville Brewing Company. They're a part of that. They supply the beer and the spirits to that venue. Brilliant. 

Matt Peiken: And the Orange Peel is owner of Rabbit Rabbit.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Same with Asheville Brewing Company and Orange Peel came together to do that. Yeah. So it's one of those things where. Not only are you diversifying the stuff you have on draft, but you're diversifying the opportunity for people to stick around. So you also see in some of these breweries you brought up burial, their original facility, the inside of it's pretty small, but they have all these little pockets outside.

Yeah, we can talk to someone. Yeah. 

Matt Peiken: They have an outdoor stage that's never used. This little tiny stage. I wanna do improv shows there. And I've wondered why is that stage rarely have ever used.

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Pitch, pitch it to 'em. I think they'd love it. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. Now we talked at the beginning of this conversation about how we have 40 plus breweries. Yeah. But every city has breweries now. Yeah. Sylva has two or three breweries. They should, Waynesville has so, so is it becoming harder for Asheville? We still call ourselves beer city, USA. Every city can call itself beer city, USA to some degree. Sure. Is Asheville going to have to work harder to compete for that beer tourism dollar going forward?

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Sure, if you can get local craft beer at any city that you're, but what we have, which nobody else has, is if we wanna say that we have as far as volume, as far as just size alone, we have three of the top 25 breweries in the country right here that you could visit in one day. You can go down to Oscar Blues in Brevard.

You can go to New Belgium and you can go to Sierra Nevada. Three just giant breweries. 

Matt Peiken: Is Highland becoming in that echelon? Tell me if I'm wrong in assessing this from my vantage from a locally born. Brewer. First one here? Yeah, first one here.

And that they are technically not the first brewery here. No. There was one called Blue Rooster that went out. Oh, really? Okay. But look what they've become and look what their tap room is. They have that outdoor concert facility, which that, which I love that it's there, but they. I don't know how they got Tourism Development authority money.

They got $870,000 of TDA money. They're not a nonprofit. I don't know how they got it, but they're the only, it's 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: a cool venue, man. It's, I've seen some great shows. There's, it's a cool 

Matt Peiken: venue, but they are, to my knowledge, are the only non-profit to ever get TDA money. I still wanna figure out how that happened. Would they be considered in that same breath of 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: so what they're considered is regional, so they're in multiple states surrounding Highland. When I say Sierra Nevada, they're international.

You can get their beer up in Canada, you can get it over in Europe. Same with New Belgium. Who is also part of, bell's Brewing Company, and it was part of a, an Australian buyout, right? You have a regional company like Highland and Wicked Weed. And burial to some degree. Their outreach is it keeps increasing, right? Yeah. And so you have some of these regional breweries here, and then you've got ones that are just for local distribution or maybe statewide distribution.

Matt Peiken: So that gets to a question I had earlier about aspiration. Is it incumbent on some of these brewers to grow and grow? Do they have to, or if they run a successful high margin local operation. Highland does. Why even step out to be a regional brewer when that just takes on more headache? The distribution? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: It, it does take out a more headache, but if there's a de that much demand for a product. You should supply that demand. Otherwise somebody else is going to. 

Matt Peiken: We've talked about the different lines of spirits that you're educating your students on. What are the career prospects today? Are they the same today? Are they greater today than they were even five years ago or 10 years ago when you founded this curriculum? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: I think they're greater today, and here's why.

I think the places that are growing are looking for, you know, some of the students I have, have opportunities to keep growing in these facilities. As the facilities grow, their positions will change their, monetary compensation will change. Ultimately, we give you a piece of paper at any school.

My job is to make that piece of paper worth a lot of money. 

Matt Peiken: How much of the success in this business comes down to what you learn versus inherent talent?

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: I think it is, has to do a lot with what you learn because you can learn to taste. Now genetically predisposition, there are things that people can't taste. Honestly, you should figure that out for yourself if you're gonna get into this industry. And that's part of the formalized training that we do here.

If you can't taste a chemical. DIl diacetyl is a a byproduct of the yeast metabolism. So yeast will throw this thing off, it's called a visceral di ketone, and then it'll turn into this chemical called Dyl, which tastes like movie butter popcorn. It tastes, it's a buttery flavor. Now, in some beverages, like a really buttery chardonnay, it's part of the flavor.

It's supposed to be there in other things, like a pilsner, it should never be there. And so it's one of those chemicals where. If you have the predisposition to taste it, then you know whether it needs to be there or not, and where that balance is gonna be. If you can't taste it, then you need to hire somebody that can, because stylistically it shouldn't be in particular products

Matt Peiken: you said you can train yourself to taste.

Do you have versions of, in your school, like I think of a guy like Sam Altman, who is the founder of chat GPT Oh, yeah. Do you have your Sam Altman, do you have your Elon Musk? Do you have your bill Gates in your program? Have you graduated?

People who you go, oh my God, that person is going to rule this industry. 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Yeah we've had some absolute rock stars. Yes. Yes, we have. 

Matt Peiken: What makes a rockstar in this industry? 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: Passion. Attitude. Willingness to learn, and humble. When they make a mistake, they admit it. And the biggest thing is when you need help, ask for help.

Matt Peiken: How many students are coming through your program 

Jeff "Puff" Irvin: every year? 

So I limit the cohort to 24 students. That's small. How many are on the waiting list? H He here. A lot.

Sometimes he, here's why. I know in May I can graduate 24 students and they can find a job locally if they have to. If they wanna move back to Kansas and find a job, great. If they came from Kansas, but they wanna go back to Oklahoma, they wanna go back to Texas, wherever they wanna go back. I'm pretty confident that they're gonna be able to find a job in this industry.

But if I graduate 24 in this area. I'm comfortable saying that year in and year out now could I have more students? Yes. That would one diminish the hands-on learning, and two, it's not responsible. 

If you have a passion for beverage, whether it's on the marketing side, entrepreneur, you want to own your open, your own place, you wanna learn this product, you wanna get into the industry.

Nobody can take the education away from you. And getting education in just about anything is a, a relatively good investment. What it translate into and as far as career wise is really up to you.