Year after year we have been increasing the number of our Fermentis Academy events, with training organized on all continents, for all types of beverage makers. Most recently, we were in Beijing, China, offering a day to remember to over 80 Chinese brewers.
For those of you who are not familiar with our Fermentis Academy events, let us inspire you by taking you through this special day in springtime China.
It’s 9.30am on a bright Sunday morning, when the first brewers’ step into the Pullman Hotel, Beijing. Welcome coffee and tea is available outside the conference room. As the guests arrive, picking up their name tags, the venue starts to fill, and you can feel a general sense of excitement on all sides.
Our guests, some of whom have travelled from far across China to attend are enthusiastic, and our Fermentis Team is just as excited! It’s one of the first Fermentis Academy events of 2024 in China and we have plenty of thrilling information to share.
At 10.00am the room has filled, and it is time to begin! We introduce the Fermentis team of the day, ready to share our passion for fermented beverages, and present the day’s program.
To make things more interactive, the Fermentis sales team China has prepared a poll, to briefly assess the knowledge of our craft brewers in attendance. Phones are out as we collect some insights, helping us highlight specific points during the day.
In the morning, we move on to some technical presentations of our beer range and introduce some of our latest yeast strains, which are highly anticipated for the Chinese market.
Around noon, we take a lunch break at the hotel’s lively restaurant. This is a nice social moment where the brewers get to mingle, and our teams gets to spend a bit of time with the various groups.
At 2pm, we gather the crowd and return to the conference room, ready to get started on perhaps the most interactive sessions of the day: the sensory tastings. Using advanced flavor molecules, we prepare a blind tasting session comparing various fermentative notes specifically associated with our wheat beer strains.
One reference industrial beer is spiked with isoamyl acetate (banana, candy notes), 4-vynil guaiacol (clove, spicy notes), ethyl hexanoate (red apple or aniseed notes) and ethyl acetate (fruity or nail varnish notes).
The experienced brewers do very well at recognizing the added aromas, dosed at 3 times the perception threshold. To make things even more tricky, we start a second round of tasting after mixing the samples on the tables! Again, our brewers in Beijing do a great job!
But this tasting session is only a training because there is more to come! Next up is a tasting session of actual craft beer, made using our latest wheat beer strains. Will our crowd recognize some of the aromatic compounds they’ve just been trained on?
Naturally! Even though it is a lot more tricky detecting multiple molecules in a potentially more complex base, there are certainly some strong fermentative notes in the beers we have on tap, including isoamyl acetate and 4-VG.
It’s 5pm and the day is slowly coming to and end. But we have one more activity for our brewers! A game to test their newly acquired knowledge after the Fermentis Academy day. 10 questions, with limited time, single or multiple answers… phones are out again and the game begins.
In the back the crowd rises to their feet to get a better view of the screen and stay on a level playing field with the ones in the front. Applauses, cries, sighs fill the room as the game progresses and the competition become more fierce!
After 20 minutes, the game is over and we celebrate the top 3 players with a little prize. This brings our busy day to and end… or does it?
Not quite! In a little wink to our French company’s origins, we invite our brewers to share a closing “Apero”: a stand-up drink with food in a different reception area. This second round of socializing gives us a final opportunity to chat with the brewers and get their feel and feedback after the event. And that’s curtains closed!
It worth pointing out our Fermentis Academy events don’t follow a standard form. There is a lot of local adaptation depending on the venue, the guests and local culture, and that’s what makes the beauty of these exceptionally rich events. No 2 Fermentis Academy events are the same.
And through our extensive research program, most of which is managed by the Fermentis Academy team hosted at the Fermentis Campus in France, there is always something new to learn at a Fermentis Academy event.
Hopefully this short recap of our Fermentis Academy Beijing 2024 will inspire you to attend a future event: we’d be thrilled to welcome you and share our passion. Check out all the next editions on our Events section of our website, there’ll probably be one upcoming near you.
Check out all out Fermentis Academy events