Alec Syvrud collects a sample to test in the lab.
Their employer couldn’t be happier. The College of Science and Engineering students are interns in the quality control office at Beaver Island Brewing Company.
The pair is responsible for checking the beer at its different stages of fermentation, checking the oxygen content, collecting data and maintaining the microbiological state of the beer. They also help to make sure the cans are up to specification.
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Beaver Island Brewing Company is a St. Cloud company that has been making beer since 2015 at its storefront facility. It opened its canning facility in 2017. The company gets its name from the Beaver Islands, a series of islands on the Mississippi river many of which are part of St. Cloud State University.
Beaver Island has made an investment in quality control equipment in an effort to consistently put a quality product in the market, and student interns bring knowledge of new techniques to the company, said Brewmaster Christopher Laumb said.
“We have decades of experience in the industry, but we don’t have the biochemical background,” he said. “It’s nice that we can have these students come in and teach an old dog new tricks.”
Syvrud and Schreifels are interning at Beaver Island through SciTechsperience, a state program that connects college students with paid internships in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields at small to mid-sized Minnesota businesses.
Syvrud is a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology major from St. Cloud. Schreifels is a Biomedical Science major from St. Cloud.
The program helps the companies find qualified candidates and offers a matching stipend to cover a portion of the interns’ wages.
Alec Syvrud works in the quality control lab at Beaver Island Brewing Company.
Schreifels and Syvrud are now heading up the quality control work at Beaver Island as well as developing new initiatives of their own.
Syvrud proposed a sensory project that will help Beaver Island collect information about how its product stands up in different storage conditions.
For the project he is working with brewers to store beer in a variety of ways that might be seen at retail locations to determine the best advice for the company to give to its customers. Every Friday he sets up a taste testing at the company so employees can taste for differences in improperly-stored cans.
“For me that’s great,” Syvrud said. “Having the opportunity as an intern to potentially institute new methods is probably not something I would get if I was interning elsewhere.”
It’s the small size of Beaver Island, which employs about 50 people, that allows Syvrud and Schreifels to branch out in their internship and learn aspects of the business beyond quality control, Syvrud said.
In addition to putting his biochemistry skills to the test in quality control, Syvrud said he’s also learned about packaging and the canning process and met with experts in hops genetics, yeast and other areas of the beer-making industry.
A lot of the staff members at Beaver Island Brewing Company are fully-trained in brewing and give them support, said Matt Studer, co-founder of Beaver Island Brewing Company.
“At the same time there’s stuff we learn from them,” he said.
