A COUPLE OF MONTHS BACK, Josh Mersfelder ’14 went truck shopping. He returned home with a charcoal-colored puppy instead, and promptly named her after an Australian hops variety.
Mersfelder recounts his story seated on a stool in his brewery’s tap room, gazing fondly at Ella as she smiles back, wagging her tail.
The anecdote reflects Mersfelder’s own journey, which led from his first love of cars to his discovery of hops — and the joy of beer making. As a teenager, he took on kitchen jobs to support his auto obsession. Continuing to JWU, Mersfelder developed a new passion, which brought him back home to upstate New York, where he is director of brewing operations at craft brewery Local 315, tucked into farmland west of Syracuse in a town called Camillus.
“It’s kind of surreal,” Mersfelder muses, holding a pint of his Retribution Double IPA and surveying the room. Bartenders pull from 16 handles to pour beers, sours and cider for visitors who have driven the back road off Interstate 90 in search of a cold custom-made brew on a hot summer’s day. “I told the owner I’d just be here to pick weeds and feed the pigs.” But after sharing his home brews — created using methods learned at JWU — Mersfelder got a call: “You can quit your job,” owner Dan Mathews said. “And start full time tomorrow.”
That was spring 2015. The brewery has taken off since day one, when the line snaked out the door and down to the goat house, and the bartenders couldn’t pour the beers fast enough. “It was like Woodstock,” says Mathews.
Nowadays, Local 315 has a comfortably packed taproom that overflows onto a spacious porch, where enthusiasts lounge in Adirondack chairs that overlook fields and forest. To the side is a beer garden, where area musicians play on a small wooden stage. Out front, food trucks rumble into the parking lot.
The wholesale side has taken off too, growing to more than 30 accounts in the first year. “I just locked down Cheesecake Factory,” Mersfelder shares. When the call to set up that account came, Mersfelder thought it was a wrong number. “This is Local 315,” he clarified, certain that the rep was looking for the mammoth Budweiser brewery the next town over, run by beer giant Anheuser Busch InBev. There was no mistake: Restaurant management wanted to make a local push.
Small-scale beers are now very big business. According to the national Brewers’ Association (BA), while total sales of beer dipped last year, craft breweries — defined by the BA as small, independent beer makers using traditional techniques — made a significant gain, with sales revenue growing by 16% to $22.3 billion, to comprise more than 12% of the nation’s overall beer market.
JWU has responded to student interest by creating a craft brewing curriculum, which kicked off at the Charlotte, Denver and Providence campuses this fall. A minor in craft brewing and a certifcate in professional brewing will be available in fall 2017.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JENNIFER PEREIRA was hired in 2003 as a wine specialist. But after her arrival at Providence, she was drawn to beer, which was given a lab day during freshman year. At that time, she thought, “They only have one day of beer. This has got to change.”
She created the JbreW Student Brewing Club. Hosting its inaugural Ocean State Homebrew Competition in spring 2011, the club saw 180 entries. JbreWers earned medals and more importantly the judges’ rave reviews for their success in organizing the event. “The club was really the only way to get experience and network in the industry,” says Pereira.
This past spring’s 500 entries included homebrews from as far a field as Oregon and California. Also last year, Pereira and students launched Providence’s official brewing team, the Wet Willies, which gives students increased access to off-campus competitions.
Academically, the university’s planned four-course brewing minor builds on its Brewing Arts class, which, says Pereira, “is really popular. Students work in teams and brew batches of beer at home.”
But student brewers, faculty emphasize, do not have an “Animal House” chug-a-lug sensibility. When Associate Professor CharLee Puckett asks his Denver students whether they’d pay the same money to get three craft beers or a mass-produced six-pack, the choice is unanimous: the smaller amount of craft.
The catalyst for today’s market? “You can thank Jimmy Carter,” says Pereira. In 1978, the president approved lifting restrictions on home brewing, and ushered in a re-education of beer drinkers. At that time, says Puckett, “It was whatever was cheapest and recognized.” Echoes Pereira, “Buying beer back then was like shopping for white paint.” Nor did overseas’ suds assuage that lack, she adds: “Most of the imports were spoiled by the time we got them.”
With the door opened for homebrewers, craft beer’s frontiersmen got to work. Now-legends such as Sam Adams founder Jim Koch shouldered the burden, carrying his brew door-to-door to bars and restaurants across Boston. “Look at how much they had to go through,” Puckett observes. “Now, people are willing to experiment.”