The Pink Boots Society is proud to announce that Jocelyn Havel of 21st Amendment Brewery is the recipient of the Oregon State University Beer Quality & Analysis course scholarship.
Chosen by the PBS Scholarship Selection Committee (SSC), five very experienced women beer professionals who hold positions as brewers, educators and writers, they chose Jocelyn to receive this scholarship as they feel “she has the technical background to fully understand the coursework and having recently been promoted to Quality Supervisor, has the most relevant job to put the tools learned in the class to work.”
Jocelyn holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, a Master’s degree in Chemistry and started out her career as a researcher and teaching assistant at the University of California, Davis where she gained extensive lab experience. When she made the decision to transition to the brewing industry she self-studied and paid for the Institute of Brewing and Distilling’s Diploma in Brewing exams out of pocket. She says the process, “pushed me to gain the technical knowledge of the brewing process, however it didn’t go in depth about beer quality.”
As the Quality Supervisor at 21st Amendment Brewery, Jocelyn is responsible for daily activities of the QA department including fermentation and yeast management, sensory analysis, microbiological QA/QC and chemical analytics. This is a role that she was promoted to in the fall of 2017 after starting as a production brewer and then moving over to the Quality team as an analyst. She hired her first female technician in January, a move that coincides with the brewery’s massive expansion that will add state of the art equipment and hugely increase their capacity within the next two years. As the company grows Jocelyn says, “I would like to continue to grow the Quality Department. The Oregon State Beer Quality and Analysis series is the perfect opportunity to give me a solid foundation on which to grow our department.”
OSU’s Beer Quality and Analysis Series teaches the fundamentals of basic beer analysis and microbiological techniques and their roles in the brewing process based on the official ASBC Methods of Analysis used in QA/QC labs worldwide, providing attendees the knowledge and tools to analyze and evaluate beer to influence quality control in a production brewing setting.
In addition to attending the course, Jocelyn will receive a pair of pink steel-toe rubber boots when she fulfills the Pay It Forward requirement associated with the scholarship.