After two years of near-inactivity, the AMS has revamped and restarted their brewery committee in order to finally create a student-funded microbrewery at the UBC Farm.
Thus far, the new committee has written their terms of reference, which outline what they will be working on over the next year. According to the document, some of the topics include funding plans, possible commercial operation models, the academic aspect of the brewery and the development of long-term agreements with UBC.
Structural changes
First approved by a referendum in 2014, the project has made few updates in recent years. Jakob Gattinger, the committee's new chair, attributed this slowdown to the fact that many of the original advocates for the brewery’s creation either graduated or moved on to different areas of focus.
“It was a small group of people who were really committed to it at the end of the day, [but] a number of them have moved on from UBC,” he said. “[Former AMS President] Aaron Bailey was one of them. As he became past AMS president and eventually moved on from UBC, I think a lot of the folks who were originally very committed to it had kind of lost interest or their time had been consumed by other things.”
To maintain the momentum this time, the new committee will be much smaller in size than previous ones. Along with Gattinger as the chair, the committee includes AMS President Alan Ehrenholtz, AMS Council members Julian Villafuerte Diaz and Mackenzie Lockhart, as well as AMS designer Michael Kingsmill.
They are also required to follow a strict set of rules that will bind them to making progress on the project. For example, meetings will be held at least once every six weeks. Voting members with two unexcused absences will be asked by the chair to resign.
“This is a project that I really think needs a special focus on commitment,” Gattinger said. “I think we have that now. We’re a smaller group but I think we’ll be able to move forward more efficiently.”
What's next?
Currently, the AMS still needs to sign a memorandum of understanding with UBC and waits for the Board of Governors's approval of the project before they can start collecting fees for the brewery.
These processes will detail the financial arrangements of the plan and the obligations of both UBC and the AMS. Once they are completed, the fee will be $2.50 per year for individual students, and then increased steadily until it reaches $7 in its fifth year.
The academic component of the brewery, which has posed challenges in the past, also needs to be worked out.
“One of the problems we had previously is that the academic programming that needed to go along with the finances kind of lagged behind, and I do need those things to happen at the same time,” said Gattinger. “This time we’re committed to making that happen.”
Despite its difficulty, this component is important because students can learn a lot from working at a microbrewery according to Tracy London, assistant dean of development and alumni engagement for the faculty of land and food systems.
“What’s exciting about the fermentation lab is that it’s a hands-on learning experience for students,” she said. “It’s not just an opportunity to learn about fermentation, but it’s also learning about beverage processing, an opportunity to learn about the life cycle of growing hops … and it’s also an opportunity for students to not just make the beer but to also have opportunities to collaborate with faculty on entrepreneurship. So marketing, the economics of craft beer.”
Overall, Gattinger acknowledged that this project is going to move at a very slow pace, but believes that completion won’t be too excessively far off into the future.
“It’s not something that will be done within the next few months by any means, but we’re working diligently,” he said.
This article has been updated to include the committee's full line-up.