As evidenced by the wealth of brewing-competition coverage on this very site, the beer industry is deep into its awards season. Over the past several weeks, winners of the Great American Beer Festival, California Craft Brewers Cup and several international competitions have been announced. This year, even local homebrewing club QUAFF‘s America’s Finest Homebrew competition was part of awards season. But there’s one more competition, one which is geared neither for pro or recreational brewers. It’s the U.S. Open College Beer Championship, a national competition where students enrolled in brewing courses through colleges and universities square off. The winners from that six-year-old event were announced recently and MiraCosta College took top honors.
The BrewTech Program (which is run through the school’s Technology Career Institute) earned the title of Grand National Champion with four gold medals and a silver. This feat was made even more impressive by the fact 2021 was the first year the college entered the competition. The gold-garnering beers were a hefeweizen, pale ale, spring IPA and stout, while a raspberry Berliner weisse nabbed the lone silver. The students who brewed the award-winning beers at MiraCosta’s in-house brewery under the direction of BrewTech professor Mike Stevenson were Ron Bass, Kyle Breckenridge, Kelly Cardinell, Kellen Darnall, Alberto Espinoza II, Mike Hughes, Ricardo Mendoza, Garrett Perkins, Kaitlin Peters, Elizabeth Robles, Amy Still, Patrick Sullivan, William Vazquez and Kristoffer Wheeler.
Two institutions tied for second place, British Columbia’s Kwantien Polytechnic University and Michigan’s Schoolcraft College, while Michigan’s Kalamazoo Valley Community College and Ontario, Canada’s Niagara College tied for fourth.
Brewing program instructors submit beers to the U.S. Open on behalf of enrollees. Those entries are then evaluated according to U.S. Open style standards, with gold, silver and bronze medals awarded in accordance with each beer’s score. This is the only brewing competition designed exclusively for educational institutions, and this year’s edition included entries from 11 colleges from the U.S. and Canada.
In addition to these latest accolades, BrewTech’s current student-placement rate is an impressive 90%, and earlier this year it became the only San Diego-based program of its kind to be certified by the Master Brewers Association of the Americas. BrewTech’s next module begins January 4 and registration is now open online.