The Science of Beer Night at Carnegie Science Center

Yasha the yeast in his natural habitat.

So Friday June 13th, the Carnegie Science Center hosted a Science of Beer night. It was part of their 21+ Night series, where they set up cash bars and have talks. (These seem really fun and we will in general be going to more of them.) For this Science of Beer night, they featured a talk about the Culture of Hops and beer tastings. Each brewery brought 2 beers, and you were give 10 tickets for tastings. (more on that later)

They had a talk about Hop Growing by Keystone Hopfarms and Hop Farm Brewery. It was very informative on the basics of the history of Hops in the USA. It was awesome to find out that Pennsylvania and New York used to be the mecca of hop growing here, pre-prohibition that is. (whoever thought prohibition was a good idea was an idiot.) The guy giving the talk was a little scatter brained and I ended up feeling a little bad for people who don't have a strong chemistry background because he started talking about alpha and beta acids. It was a good talk, but it wasn't what I was expecting by the title: history of hop culture and how hops are used in brewing.

So onto the tasting set up. Since there were only 5 breweries each line was packed. They either needed more tables pouring the same beers or less beers but larger sample sizes. The sample size was 1 ounce. Multiple tables ran out of beer by 9 pm. We didn't get to try beer from Rivertowne Brewery. We ended up using 6 of our 10 tickets each on the only beer left at the end of the night, a pilsner from North Country Brewing Company. We saw extra wrist bands just sitting around with only 1-2 tickets used. People just left because the lines were insanely long and overall it was super crowded.

On the up side, they were raffling off Bread and Beer yeast stuffed plashes from GiantMicrobes. I have been wanting one of these for a while and since everyone had left before they called the names for the raffle, we were able to score a microbe. We have named him Yasha and he is super cute. (Also Dave beat a robot at air hockey)

Once again, like everything in Pittsburgh pertaining to beer, it was super packed and claustrophobic. The idea was good but the execution was horrible. I'd love to see them do this idea again but maybe change things around. It really did end up being one giant line and so you couldn't really check out the exhibits. The tickets were $17, more than their normal 21+ night prices, and it probably wasn't worth it. I would have preferred them having craft beers at the cash bar and then having multiple different talks on the science of beer.