How to Engineer the Perfect PintA 30-year partnership turns science into suds (and careers).

For the past 30 years, chemical engineering students have been visiting the OSU Research Brewery to experience practical applications of what they study in class. The collaboration between engineering and the pilot brewery not only helps bring theoretical concepts to life, but also teaches students about the chemical engineering careers they could pursue in the field of food science. 

“Being able to show students what’s possible — it’s a little different from hearing a lecture about those things. They actually get to see it in use, without having to leave campus,” said Jeff Clawson, ’88, M.S. ’94, brewery pilot plant manager in the College of Agricultural Science’s Department of Food Science and Technology. 

Pilot plant manager Jeff Clawson today and (below) about 30 years ago, when the fledgling OSU Research Brewery got its start.

The informal partnership began around 1995 with Clawson and Skip Rochefort, associate professor of chemical engineering. Rochefort brought some seniors to the fledgling pilot brewery — which at the time comprised a small system of steam kettles cobbled together with dairy equipment — to do a brewing experiment. A few years later, he helped design a heat exchanger when the brewery expanded to include five new fermenters.

Class tours of the brewery grew and continued through the craft brewing boom of the 2010s, and when the facility went fully automatic in 2018, students gained the opportunity to learn about the modern equipment used by most major regional breweries. 

“It’s just tremendous — beautiful and automated and really a chemical engineering wonderland,” Rochefort said of OSU’s brewery. “It’s really the only place on campus where we have something resembling a pilot scale facility, similar to what students might run into when they go into industry.” 

It’s just tremendous — beautiful and automated and really a chemical engineering wonderland.

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For many years, Rochefort brought his intro-level classes on the tours, but he jokes that too many students were switching majors to study food science instead of engineering, so now he takes only juniors and seniors because it’s “too late for them to change.” (He’s fine if they want to minor in food science, though.) 

When Cory Simon, another associate professor of chemical engineering, started teaching at OSU in 2017, he jumped at the chance to work with Clawson. Simon teaches upper-division courses focused on the mathematics behind programming computers to control chemical processes. 

The brewery offers a textbook example of a chemical engineering “control loop,” Simon said. Clawson has a big vat of the wort — the sweet liquid extracted from malted grains that turns into beer after fermentation — but it first must be heated to a certain temperature. To do that, a pump pushes the wort through a pipe, where it circulates through a chamber filled with hot steam. Engineers program the computer to know what temperature the wort needs to be; then the computer automatically opens and closes the steam valve accordingly to let in the right amount of steam to quickly and precisely heat the wort to the desired temperature. 

Valves, pumps, heat exchangers and an array of sensors work together to ensure a reproducible beer.

A typical chemical plant might have hundreds of similar control loops, Simon said. 

“In class, we study a similar temperature control system, but from a theoretical point of view. I sketch it out in my notes. I explain how the control valve works, how it’s pneumatically actuated. I show them a picture on Wikipedia,” he said. “But when the students do Jeff’s tour, they get to see an actual control valve and hear the air pressurizing and depressurizing. They see the control system in action, automatically bringing the temperature to a new desired set point. It’s a really modern control system and computer interface, too.”

Last spring term, Rochefort and Simon brought nearly 200 students through the brewery in groups over several days. Clawson said he gives 20 to 30 tours each year to various classes, including the “History of Beer” course taught in the College of Liberal Arts by history instructor John Bawden and archivist Tiah Edmunson-Morton, who leads the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives. 

Around 2010, the brewery also collaborated with mechanical engineering when Associate Professor John Parmigiani worked with his students on a capstone project to build a mini-malter. This small-scale, automated system designed for malting grain allows the barley program in crop and soil science to collaborate with the pilot brewery. The machine is still in use today.  

“Around campus, we have a tendency to get siloed,” Clawson said. “When we’re working across disciplines, it really opens minds and opens doors, not only for students, but for faculty as well.”

The tours with Clawson are always a highlight of the year for students, Rochefort and Simon say — even though they don’t get to sample the beer during their visits. 

“The fact of the matter is, we want our students to get jobs. Everybody thinks ‘microelectronics,’ but that’s not for everybody,” Rochefort said. “We’re showing them they can get jobs in the food industry, where there are a lot of chemical engineers employed; it’s not only oil and gas or microelectronics.”