Portrait of a Brewer: Peter Cronin, AleSmith Brewing

There are hundreds of talented brewing professionals giving their all to help maintain the San Diego beer industry’s storied reputation. While these industrious practitioners share numerous similarities, each is their own unique person with individual likes, dislikes, methodologies, techniques, inspirations, interests and philosophies. The goal of San Diego Beer News’ Portrait of a Brewer series is to not only introduce readers to local brewers, but dig in to help them gain a deeper appreciation for the people making their beer and how they have contributed to the county’s standout craft-brewing culture.

Today’s featured brewer is…

Peter Cronin
of AleSmith Brewing

What is your current title?
Quality Manager

Where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in San Mateo.

What brought you to San Diego?
A research job in the lab of Dr. Paula Desplats at UCSD where I studied epigenetic mechanisms of neurodegenerative disease.

What was the first beer and/or alcoholic beverage you ever had?
There is a silly photo of me as a baby in my dad’s lap holding his Guinness. I honestly don’t know what it was, but it was either Guinness or Jameson at a family function.

What was your a-ha moment that turned you on to craft beer?
My senior year of undergrad in Boston finding a neighborhood bar that had Harpoon IPA, Stone’s Arrogant Bastard Ale, Anchor Steam, Magic Hat #9 and an assortment of Sam Adams seasonals (26.2 being my favorite). As a treat after a tough exam, I’d buy myself a bottle of Ommegang Three Philosopher’s, too.

What led you to consider a career in brewing?
I had been homebrewing for a long time and I clocked 26 individual five-gallon batches in my first year after moving to San Diego. Luckily, I lived in a house where we were all twenty-somethings and it was always quickly imbibed. With that amount of production I could iterate and perfect certain recipes. UCSD started their Extension brewing school and I joined the second cohort in 2013. In general, my classmates were half industry folk and half wanting to get in. I liked how collaborative the science of the beer industry was, probably because it had its roots in homebrewing. Coming from biotech and academia, where science was competitive, it was invigorating. After graduating from that program, I taught the Barrel-Aging course for a few years with Portrait of a Brewer alum Anthony Chen (AKA: Ant).

What was your first brewing/brewery position?
Quality Technician at AleSmith was the first position I applied to out of brewing school.

What breweries have you worked for over your career and in what roles?
Just AleSmith. It seems like I chose well.

Who have been the individuals that have helped you the most to learn and advance in your career, and how?
The teachers at the UCSD Brewing school – Yuseff Cherney, Tomme Arthur, Mitch Steele, Gwen Conley and Lee Chase. Then at AleSmith, Peter Zien, Ryan Crisp and Ant. I really enjoy being around people that deeply think not only about recipes but processes. Craft still exists.

What singular piece of advice would you give to someone interested in becoming a professional brewer?
Gain technical knowledge first, then apply it. You can do that by reading the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists to stay up to date. As a brewer you need to be an electrician, plumber, carpenter, welder and more.

What ultimate career goal would you like to achieve?
Definitely to get published. I have an insane backlog of experiments always fizzing in my head. Once the quality department expands to two people, I’m definitely allowing those ideas to ferment.

What is your favorite beer you’ve ever brewed, be it on a professional or amateur level?
Personally brewed – Munich helles. Professionally quality-managed – Port Barrel-Aged Wee Heavy brewed and barrel-aged by the fantastic AleSmith brewing team.

What is your least-favorite beer you’ve ever brewed on any level?
It was a stout collaboration with a brewery that no longer exists. We used an insane amount of extract and for me a lot of extract plus a bittersweet stout equals cough syrup.

What are your favorite and least-favorite hop varietals at present?
I love Hallertau Mittelfrüh, Krush and Crosby Hops CH2. We picked a fantastic late-harvest Cascade lot last month up in Portland that made me giddy as I was smelling it. The farmer was in the room, too, and was excited that he could allow his Cascade to go for so long without a quality hit. As for dislikes, I loathe OG (onion/garlic), so Summit and some Nelson and Mosaic lots.

What are some of your favorite brewing ingredients that aren’t hops?
I love Belgian beers that blend phenol and estery yeast notes with real herbs and spices, like white pepper, juniper and heather.

If you weren’t a brewer, what do you think you would do for a living?
Probably just continue in neuroscience research.

In your opinion, what non-brewing position is of great importance at a craft-beer company but often gets overlooked or less credit than those making the beer?
Without a doubt packaging. The beer is at its most expensive at that moment. There has been so much care in ingredients and time at that stage, and all it takes are a few molecules of oxygen to come in and ruin it, so they always have to be on their A-game.

What is your favorite beer style?
Munich helles

If you could wipe one style of beer off the face of the earth, what would it be?
I’ve probably had at least a few good beers of every style, so this is hard, but the one that has probably the worst percentage is pastry stout. It’s like ordering an Old Fashioned and having it come out way too sweet.

What single brewing company’s beers and/or ethos/style has been most influential on your style?
Any brewery where science is at the heart – think Duvel, Asahi, New Belgium Brewing, and Russian River Brewing.

What is your favorite San Diego County brewing company?
North Park Beer Co. 

What is your favorite brewing company outside of San Diego?
Tegernsee (see above Munich helles). Also, shout out to Andechs being close.

What three breweries that you haven’t yet visited—local or elsewhere—are on your current must-see bucket list?
Sapporo Brewery on Hokkaido, Westvleteren in Belgium and I still haven’t been to Sierra Nevada (shame).

What are your favorite local beer events?
Any good beer-and-food-pairing event. I still think about a San Diego Restaurant Week fish taco competition with a bunch of local breweries paired up. I think I ate over 15 fish tacos that night.

If you were to leave San Diego, where would be the next-best place you’d want to brew?
I look at cheap European castles and manor houses on a weekly basis. It’d be so nice to set up a brewery and distillery in an old stable and have a lovely biergarten in the courtyard. Anyone want to be my investor? Haha!

Which musical genre or artists are on your brew-day soundtrack/playlist?
Radiohead, Chappell Roan, Beethoven, Patrick Cowley, Dua Lipa. In general, classical, alternative, pop, prog-rock and Hi-NRG.

What motto rules the way you brew and approach brewing in a professional brewhouse?
“N=1”. It’s just a statistics thing I say if someone wants to make a large decision after we’ve only used an ingredient or done a process once. You need a large sample set to know what the ingredient or process actually does.

What do you consider your greatest professional accomplishments?
Early on at AleSmith, I did some studies with the Shellhammer lab at OSU showing that the process we scaled up from homebrew to production didn’t change the beer and that, in fact, we preferred the beer without the method. It saved us a bunch of labor and ingredients. What’s interesting is we actually bring that process back sometimes because it does work, just not on most beers.

What are you proud of having achieved in your personal life?
It’s not an achievement, but I feel like I’m in a good spot. I have a kick-ass husband who fills our house with music, a shared obsession with LEGO, two amazingly cartoonish cats and a friend group that is down to hang for 12 hours during our LoTR extended edition marathons.

When you’re not at work, what do you like to do for fun?
I have a woodworking side business that keeps me busy and I sing in the San Diego Master Chorale which performs anything from Bach to Bruce Springsteen.

Where do you like to drink off-the-clock?
Usually at home. I got really into cocktail making five years ago and love making a well-balanced cocktail with homemade syrups and bitters.

What is your favorite beer-and-food pairing of all time?
A clean, crisp West Coast IPA with a delicate, crema-drizzled fish taco. I cannot tell you how happy I am that I get to live in a time period and in a place where those two things can come together like that.

If you could somehow plan your last beer dinner before dying, what would you drink and eat, and who would you invite to join you?
Assuming I’ve seen all my friends and family enough leading up to this, Gandalf seems like a good hang (sorry just had the LoTR party). I’d love to drink some pub-style ales like a mild and bitter while eating a good smashburger with fries. 

Who do you think you are (a purposely broad question)?
A terrifyingly odd combo of type-A with absent-minded professor energy. I want and expect perfection from myself, but I have so many projects always going that I get side-tracked by something as simple as a quick question from a colleague. That is simply because no question is quick or small to me. I break it down to so many other questions that the poor person who asked me expecting a quick answer now has homework. Also, I am generally a critical person – like when it comes to beer, it’s so fun to break it down and come up with the recipe, process and attributes, but dang I love a beer where it’s so good my mind doesn’t do the above. When something is so good my critical side just switches off and I get to enjoy the moment, who doesn’t like that?

If you’re a brewer at a San Diego brewing company and would like to be featured in our Portrait of a Brewer series, drop us a line at [email protected].