Hi!
My name is Tzourbakis Iasonas and I am a Food Technologist, a graduate of the American Farm School in Thessaloniki, with an MSc in Quality Assurance (University of Reading, UK).
At the end of the first year of my undergraduate studies, I managed to get a scholarship from the Macedonia-Thrace Brewery (Vergina), as an appreciation of my academic performance. As a young person in the field of food, this achievement piqued my interest in the field of beer brewing! Already having access to basic knowledge and the laboratory of the School, all the ingredients of the beer, except the hops, were familiar to me, something that encouraged me to proceed to the planning of my first beer. Searching through the internet and watching others making their own beer, through videos.
I then started buying my initial equipment, two buckets and bottling equipment. Without knowing about the different types of beer, except of "Lagers", which can be primarily found in Greece, I decided to experiment with a Pale Ale.
In a ten-liter pot, with a bag of malt, the bathtub acting as a heat exchanger, and the simplest ingredients [some sort of barley and a single hop variaty-SMASH (Single Mash And Single Hops)], I made my first beer.
The truth is that ... it did not go so well. This final product was not what I had designed on paper, let alone something that, as I saw in the videos, one would enjoy drinking.
Instead of throwing away these bottles, I stored them in the basement of my house.
Two years later, I found those bottles and tried them. The result had nothing to do with what it was back then. And why should be anyway? An unfiltered and non-pasteurized beer, bottled with its yeast, has the peculiarity of changing (developing) itself. The purity is improved, the taste and aromas are balanced. The beer matures like a wine does. Something that is much more familiar to us.
This experience made me see beer completely differently and was the spark that made me take the decision to get professionally involved in the creation and production of beer!