‘You can teach anything through beer’

The Brewing Science Lab has been a publicity gold mine for UNH. Reporters (including me) can’t resist stories about the science of making beer.

Here’s the latest example: A nice piece in Foster’s Daily Democrat, the weirdly-named daily paper of Dover, about the lab’s latest concoction – a “history beer” project that’s trying to recreate the brew that would have been made out on Smuttnose Island, one of the Isels of Shoals, in the early days of Colonial settlement. You can read it here.

“We wanted a beer that really created the experience of sitting out at Smuttynose Island in the 1700s, with the sea salt in the air, sitting in a dark smoky tavern, and then put that in a glass,” Baron said.

“This area was a real frontier in the 1600s,” Howey said. “This was the Wild West. We don’t think of it like that, but this was far from Boston, and the people here were very different.”

The ever-quotable lab manager, Cheryl Parker, has the best line: “Beer is so relatable, you can teach anything through beer.”