Collegiate Times

Sean O'Keefe likes beer; more importantly, he likes to brew beer. To this day, it is a tradition that he still regularly adheres to, mostly focusing on the production of brown and pale ales.

"My next door neighbor," he said, "and the guy two over are both beer lovers, and one guy has a couple of soda kegs in his basement fridge so I help keep those stocked for that. My interest in beer primarily came through home-brewing."

Growing up in Nova Scotia, he came from a country known for its heavy taxation of alcohol. In college, he discovered the sensibility and intrigue that comes with the art of brewing.

"I was home-brewing in college," O'Keefe said. "Not just as a way of getting cheap beer but just sort of as an introductory exercise or hobby. And in food science, when I was doing my master's degree, several of my professors would make beer or would start making beer, and they showed me how to make beer. ... So that was in the early 1980s, so I've been making beer for pushing 30 years now."

Now a professor with the Food Science and Technology department, O'Keefe, has been able to share his passion for brewing with his students in the form of the Brewing Science and Technology class (FST 3124), which he teaches every fall semester.

O'Keefe began working on the class in 2004, when he noticed a growing interest around campus in home brewing.

"I've had a lot of students come to me," he said, "knowing that I'm a home brewer, asking for help, and I've also had students in food science come to me and say, 'How can I get into brewing as a career?' So I realized there was a lot of interest in beer, so I developed the class six years ago primarily as a class to sort of span different areas in the university so you wouldn't have to have a specialist knowledge in food science to understand the class. That's one of the things I really wanted to ensure, was to really allow a wide audience in terms of the backgrounds of the students who are interested in beer."

Sitting in his office, number 119 in the red brick Food Sciences building, O'Keefe is wearing a blue "GAP" shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. There are several pictures posted up throughout his space of family, friends, and mostly his twin daughters - about 30. He is drinking some freshly made Ulan tea, a tea he was turned on to when he began teaching scientific writing classes online in Taiwan once a month for the last two years. He has quite the access now teaching in a land that specializes in the tea.

The Brewing Science and Technology class was first taught in 2005 at Virginia Tech under a generic 4,000 level course number, but it did not become formally approved by the university until last year, giving it a 3,000 level code.

"It took me about four years to get the class formally approved," he said. "This was the first class that I went through the normal approval process."

One of the biggest issues that he cited in getting the class approved was finding an adequate textbook.

"I have 18 books there," he said pointing to the many behind my head on the shelf with fun titles such as "Lipids in Food," "Fats For the Future" and "Food Alert." "And maybe three of them would be appropriate for a class like this. I have some that are $250 to $350; one of them there is used by the degree in Brewing Science in Berlin. $300 ... That's not really an appropriate price for a student to pay for a book."

The titles suggest a course with an intense scientific structure, and Brewing Science and Technology does cover some chemistry.

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