The Press Herald has kicked off a new series, Maine at Work,with a look at the work life of Mark Boissonneault, a senior brewer at Shipyard.
And, to my horror, there was math.
Boissonneault showed me his recipe sheet for the day’s batch of Shipyard Export Ale, and I instantly had a flashback to high school algebra. There were numbers with six or seven numerals after the decimal point, and equations where “bitterness values” are assigned to various kinds of hops. (The bitterness value is calculated by multiplying the alpha acids by the weight of the hops, by the way.)
This is way too much math, I thought. I need a drink.