Drinking Beer for a Living

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Name: Brian Cofresi

Occupation: Brew Master at River City Brewing Company

Job in Past Life: Auto technician

Beer Education: American Brewers Guild in Davis

First Beer: Miller High Life and Schlitz


How did you get into brewing beer?
I got into home brewing back in 1993 and it was like learning a secret, like baking bread. It was a hobby. I read a book on home brewing and I read it three times before I got around to doing it.

Did you always like beer more than the average person?
It was the opposite. For years, beer was all the same—yellow fizzy water—and I didn’t like it. It made me gag. Then I discovered beer could be black, made with wheat and have different flavors.

What are the three primary ingredients in beer?
Malt is the primary ingredient—that’s barley that has been germinated, Next is hops; it balances the sugar and the bitterness. Then there’s yeast, the tiny little workers that convert sugars into alcohol. I am lord of billions of yeast cells.

What might surprise people about beer and beer making?
That some have really old histories, like a Belgian White—it actually predates hops in its concept. It's hard to invent a beer that hasn't been done before. When making [a historic] beer, at some points, you have to guess what a beer was like; you can make an educated guess. I read a home brewing book on porter and there was this incredible description of what it was like in the 1800s. Then I looked at the recipe and realized that it didn’t work for today. So porters are somewhat different today than they were.

The trend in food and wine is organic. Is this happening for beer, too?
Organic beer is made with organic ingredients. They do have organic hops and organic malts, but they often come from long distance. In the slow food movement, it’s about place and people; they support local agriculture, local markets and they try to source from them. With organic beers, [the slow foodists] want them, but they may come from far away.