https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment27
Partial Transcript: So you were born in Oregon?
Segment Synopsis: Just tells that she was born in Portland, Oregon. Just discusses how her parents were divorced at a very early age and she moved with her mom in to NE Portland. She has one sister and one step-brother. She tells that her family's nexus is in Portland. She discusses how her family were really young, when she was born, and how her parents had a lot of alternative/liberal views on parenting. She discusses that her Dad is an artist, and was pretty permissive with things she wanted to do when she was young. She talks about moving from Grant High School in Portland to West Linn High School in West Linn, and then deciding to drop out. Even thought she dropped out, she says that she always worked. She tells that her dad purchased her a home brewing kit when she was only 14. Just tells some early stories of rebellious days as teenager, and her dads early relationship with renaissance brewers in the Pearl District of Portland.
Keywords: 7th Day Adventist; City Bus; Community College; Dropping-out; Family relationships; Grant High School; Homebrewing; Independence; Jobs; Portland; Portland Brewing; SPAM; Washington County; West-Linn; Yeast
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment845
Partial Transcript: At that point, were you thinking about what those yeasts tasted like?
Segment Synopsis: Just talks about her early home brewing days. Just shares that she learned a lot about the different styles of beer from reading and researching. She also got a lot of information form home brewing stores. Just tells about her time about Clackamas Community College and how are first she was only going in an effort to satisfy her parents, but then she started to really enjoy her Biology and Chemistry classes, and eventually transferred to Oregon State, to study Biochemistry. She shares that even at that age she knew she wanted to be a home brewer.
Subjects: Biology; Chemistry; Community College; Fermentation; Joy of Homebrewing; Oregon State University; Researching; Sensory; Types of beer; Yeast
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment1120
Partial Transcript: Did you have friends who were in to brewing with you?
Segment Synopsis: Just shares that she didn't have a large group of friends, or any friends that shared a passion for home brewing and craft beer the same way she did. She shares that in her early home brewing days, she really had a passion for making the beer, not really drinking it. Just shares how surprised she was when she learned that there was a brewery, and a food science department within OSU. After discovering this, she shares that she instantly changed her major. She shares that she felt like she found a home within the food science department. She says that since she did not really go to high school, that she thinks of the students she studied with in a similar way to how others would describe their graduating high school class. The people she studied with then, are still her best friends today.
Keywords: Brewing; Fermentation Sciences; Friends; High School; Major; Oregon State University; Relationships; Wedding
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment1514
Partial Transcript: What was it like to be in the department?
Segment Synopsis: Just describes the fermentation option within the food science department. She says that the option seemed very solid while she was studying then. However, she knows now that the program didn't really know what they were doing in regards to fermentation. Just tells that she stuck around for graduate school. She compares and contrasts the department from the way she saw it as a student back in the 1990s compared to the way she sees it now as part of the faculty.
Keywords: Courses; Fermentation; Graduate school; alcohol; curriculum; education
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment1825
Partial Transcript: Why did you stay for Graduate School?
Segment Synopsis: Just discusses why she stayed for graduate school. She talks about how wanted to learn more, and at this point was good at school, and didn't know what else really to do. She enjoyed talking classes, and they were cheaper at the time. Just discusses her thesis, about the effects of wine during meals and if it reduced your chances at contracting food-bourne illness. She says that her thesis was picked up by national news outlets, and was in LA times, and ironically was in a Playboy article.
Keywords: E.Coli; Fun; Graduate School; Kombucha; National News; Salmonella; Thesis; Undergrad; food safety; pathogems
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment2335
Partial Transcript: So what was the department like?
Segment Synopsis: Just discusses the people she attended grad school with. Most were really interested in fermentation, but not like her who shared her interest in home brewing. She talks about how people came from different education backgrounds, but mostly either science or agricultural. She says that most of her cohort is still in the food business, but not many are in beer.
Keywords: Agriculture; Demographics; Engineers; Food Science
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment2522
Partial Transcript: What about your memories of that time of beer produced in Oregon?
Segment Synopsis: Just discusses her memories of Oregon beer. She shares her memories of working on a Portland bus that drove people around to different iconic breweries in Portland. She also shares from memory the major players on the beer scene in Oregon at the time. Just remembers ironically judging a home brewing competition when she was only 20 years old. Just shares about working at Ste. Michelle Wine Estates as an intern right after she finished her masters, and then her first real job at Scott Laboratories which is in the bay area in California.
Keywords: 1990s; Bay Area; Beer Tourism; Bridgeport; California; Full Sail Brewing; Homebrewing; Jobs; Oregon; Portland Brew Bus; Portland Brewing; Scott Laboratories; Ste. Michelle Wine Estates; Weinhard's; Widmer
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment2890
Partial Transcript: So you did your internship...the winery was in Washington? Did you think you wanted to stay in wine-making at that time?
Segment Synopsis: Just shares that she never really had a plan/idea of what she wanted to do for a career. She explains that she took the wine making job, more so as an escape, not because she thought about it, but because it was offered. When she took the job in California at Scott Labs, it ended up being more of a sales job instead of actually fermenting beer and wine. Just describes living in California, and shares that it was a lot of fun. She talks about how expensive it was living in California, and how many more people were there. Just discuses the city she lived in, Petaluma, and describes that California never really felt like home, especially the way Oregon does.
Keywords: California; Petaluma; Santa Rosa; Washington; career; fermentation; rural; sales; travel; wine making
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment3292
Partial Transcript: Did you ever feel drawn to Davis?
Segment Synopsis: Just talks about how she wanted to go back to a University, to work in a sort of adviser . She describes that she never felt drawn to UC Davis, and was almost a little biased against it. She says it almost seemed like there was a Davis clique, and if you wanted to work at a winery in the area, you had to go to Davis. Just talks about how she studied at the University of Georgia in the food safety program for about a year, but then realized it wasn't for her. Just discusses the difference between the West Coast and the South. She shares some stories of living there, and the differences between drinking habits.
Keywords: Athens; Brewing; Fresno; New Orleans; San Luis Obispo; Sonoma; UC Davis; University of Georgia; Walla Walla; Washington; Washington State; Wine; the South
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment3953
Partial Transcript: I'm guessing there wasn't a moment where you said "hey lets stay in the South?"
Segment Synopsis: Just talks about one of her good friends in Georgia, and tells a story about him and her getting beers at a pub at how it changed his outlook on beer. She talks about how it was not the plan to stay in Georgia, but she has some good friends. She decided against finishing school in Georgia, and moved back to California to go back to work at Scott Labs. After a year in California, she gave up her job and moved to London with her husband for his work. She lived there for three years, but never worked while she was there. She talks about her volunteer work with a few different organizations while she was there. In particular she shares a story about working with the campaign for real ale (CAMRA). Just talks about pub culture in England and in London particular. She tells about how she went to a lot of different pubs around London and surveyed them for CAMRA to make publications. She even won a plaque from CAMRA HQ commemorating her for all her hard volunteer work.
Keywords: Age; Ale; Beer Organizations; California; Campain for real ale; College; Distilling; Georgia; HSBC; Husband; London; Ph.D; Pub Culture; Scott Laboratories; West London
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment5171
Partial Transcript: What about microbrew culture in London?
Segment Synopsis: Just talks about microbrew culture in London. She explains that its for sure not as popular there, and pubs are so steeped in tradition in England that it was hard for it to take off like it did in the United States. However, there are for sure some, but they are just not as common. Just discusses that American beer was not really on the radar of a lot of British people.
Keywords: American beer; CAMRA; Craft Beer; London; Microbrew; West Coast; homebrewing; real ale
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment5553
Partial Transcript: So, you came back in 2015?
Segment Synopsis: Just talks about returning to the United States to come work at Oregon State. She talks about learning about the job at OSU, from Tom Shellhammer, a professor at Oregon State. Just talks about her experience of coming back to OSU and was surprised how similar OSU was to when she was here as a graduate student. Just talks about how she really identifies with the students, and she really enjoys teaching and advising.
Keywords: 2014; 2015; Academics; Advising; Courses; Food Science; Oregon State University; Teaching; Tom Shellhammer
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohms-viewer/render.php?cachefile=oh35-just-jessica-20170525.xml#segment6005
Partial Transcript: How did you learn how to teach making cider?
Segment Synopsis: Just talks about learning how to make cider, and teaching others about it. Just talks about how the university is really supportive of her trying new things. She enjoys her time teaching and developing new curriculum. Just discusses her upcoming move to Portland and her living situation up there, she shares that she excited to move back to Portland, because Portland is home. Just concludes by sharing that she feels like its nice to be a part of the brewing community in Oregon, and especially at Oregon State.
Keywords: Beer; Brew Dr. Kombucha; Cider; Coffee; Corvallis; Family; Fermentation; Food Science; Oregon State University; Portland; Teaching; kombucha
TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Alright. We are rolling.
JESSICA JUST: I'm Jessica Just. I was born in 1976. We are sitting in the Valley
Library of the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. Today is May 25, 2017.TEM: Right. Excellent. Not 2019.
JJ: [Laughs] I am from the future.
TEM: So, you were born in Oregon.
JJ: I was.
TEM: Correct? In Portland?
JJ: I was born in Portland, delivered by the same doctor that delivered my
mother, weirdly.TEM: So, long-term, like your family lived in Portland?
JJ: Yeah. My mom's side is from primarily Washington County. My dad moved here
when he was quite little. I'm an Oregonian, but I've lived out of Oregon long enough that I'm not one of those people that I'm like I'm from here. I'm a native. Like, I don't know. There was a comedian that said, you know, saying that you're proud you were born in Oregon is like saying you're proud you were 00:01:00born cesarean, or something like that. Like, you have no control over that.TEM: Or even how many of your ancestors were born here.
JJ: Right.
TEM: Less control of that.
JJ: What I am happy about, being from Oregon and having lived here for so long,
is I'm so happy to be living back in Oregon. I'm delighted every day to be like just back at home. It's a nice place to live.TEM: Especially now that we've turned the corner in to spring.
JJ: Yeah. It was a rough winter.
TEM: So, did your mom's family live in the city or were they out more in the country?
JJ: Yeah, my grandparents, so that'd be the Christiansen [phonetic] side of my
family, they, not in the city. They were in Washington County, primarily. Both sides of my family come from a pretty religious background, so Seventh Day 00:02:00Adventist. There's a Seventh Day Adventist enclave around what used to be Laurelwood Academy that's in a little tiny community in Laurelwood but very near Gaston out in Washington County. My grandparents' house was in Cornelius and my grandmother worked for Hillsborough and Washington County for a long time. That's where my mom's people are from. When I was a kid, my parents divorced when I was quite young. My mom moved us to northeast Portland in the '80s. I always consider myself like an inner city kid, which seems funny now with Portland thinking of that as inner city because it's such a-it's not a very even necessarily diverse place. Back in the '80s in my neighborhood I was poor and very diverse. I liked where I grew up but I felt like I grew up very urbanely, even though it was Portland.TEM: Did you have brothers and sisters?
00:03:00JJ: I have a sister. I have a sister who is a food science major also. She works
for Hormel now. She helps make Spam, which is funny being raised Seventh Day Adventist, we don't eat pork. She still doesn't eat pork, which is super funny. Then I have a step family, too. When people ask the question do I have siblings I always talk about my sister and then I think about my brother and I don't mention him until later, but I do have a stepbrother who I was raised with as my brother. We didn't talk for a long time after my stepmom died. We're okay now, but we lost the habit of being family, sort of. I do have a, he's my brother.TEM: Did your mom and dad both remain living in Portland?
JJ: Mm-hmm [yes]. For a long time. My mom's still in Portland. My dad ended up
moving around a bit. He came back for a little bit. Now he's in Medford. But yeah, the family's centered in and around Portland and really up until last year 00:04:00I had three of my grandparents still. Now I just have one. They were all even between Salem, Newberg, Portland.TEM: Your dad was an artist, right?
JJ: Yeah.
TEM: Is an artist?
JJ: Yes, he is an artist. He's never made any money at it [laughs]. To me, he's
like a real artist. Yeah, so how he makes his living now is he's a packaging designer. He works for Harry & David. It seems like I was counting all the people that work in food in my family the other day. I was like that's quite a few of us. Yes, so he's a packaging designer, but he's always done fine art. He's actually, so he's kind of an alternate thinker. I don't even know what that means, right? Probably all of us are alternative thinkers, but especially growing up. My parents were pretty young when they had us. If somebody can do 00:05:00the math I'm 40 and I think about it a lot because when my parents were my age, I would have been 19. Right? Yeah, that's got to be right, because they were 21 when I was born. When I was a little kid, they were just babies themselves [laughs]. They were in their 20s, maybe not even through adolescence themselves, I don't know. My dad had a lot of interesting ideas around parenting, especially I think after-both my folks were in a pretty strict religious background. Neither one of them are religious anymore. Then, for them divorcing and then coming through, you know, whatever hangovers from their religion and both of them exploring the world with new eyes when my sister and I were pretty little. My dad pursued his art career, so he started going to art school a little bit. 00:06:00He never finished. Anyway, he always had like ideas about parenting.When I was a teenager and I didn't want to go to school anymore, my dad didn't
make me go. He just didn't make me go. He let me play videogames for several months. I actually dropped out of high school when I was, just after my freshman year. I would have been about 14, 15. I had started to attend, I went to Grant High School, which is in northeast Portland and I started to attend Westland High School, which is the school district where my dad lived, because I had gone to live with him. I didn't like it. It was too much of a culture shock for me at the time. It was really different. Those are very different school districts. I think it was 11 days into my sophomore year and I just stopped going. My dad didn't do anything. But, I always worked. I always had a part-time job. I grew 00:07:00up taking the city bus everywhere. Plus, with my parents being divorced and going back and forth, I was quite independent, and so my dad just didn't need me. I played videogames for about six months and I read a Hemmingway novel, The Sun Also Rises. I did an anatomy coloring book. This is what I remember from that time. After about, mostly it was videogames, though, after a few months my dad said he didn't think my videogaming career was going to take me anywhere and maybe I should enroll at the community college, which I did. It was also around that time, so I'm trying to get the timing-my dad gave me a home brewing kit when I was 14, which isn't, again, part of Dad's alternate, I don't know, parenting theory. I mean, he's explained some of this to me later, right? Why 00:08:00would you give your kid a home brewing kit? But, I was a little bit troubled at that time, like many teenagers are. On one occasion, it hadn't been too long before my birthday, I had been down at High Rocks, which is a place in Clackamas, on the Clackamas River. It doesn't matter. It's like a swimming hole.TEM: Okay.
JJ: I was there with an older cousin of mine, and I think, I don't know, we met
some boys or something. I think I drank half of a Hamm's, a tallboy Hamm's, or something. I think I came home and I was a little bit like [makes gesture], maybe a little bit buzzed or whatever. Gone are those days, by the way, where I can get buzzed on half a can of Hamm's. Then my dad, he could tell something was up with me, even though I was a teenager and I was rebellious, I never lied to my parents. That was never my thing. I was never trying to get in trouble. So, I 00:09:00told him what had happened, and he was so upset. He was really frustrated, but not because I was drunk or buzzed or whatever. It was because I was drinking that horrible beer.TEM: This was like the '80s, early '90s.
JJ: Yes, exactly, this is like the height of the craft brewing renaissance in
Oregon, especially in Portland area, right? Then beyond that my dad, his studio was in the Pearl District back in the days when it was artist lofts and all that stuff. Portland brewing, so dad's office was between 13th and 14th, between Davis and Everett, I think. Portland Brewing was just a couple blocks away, like two or three blocks away, and Art Larrance was one of the guys that started Portland Brewing. My dad, through his packaging like graphic design connections, 00:10:00I mean it was even his buddy that did the packaging for Portland Brewing. Anyway, my dad somehow knew Art Larrance, right? So, after the Hamm's incident at High Rocks.TEM: [Laughs].
JJ: Jessica! He took me to the brewery, which wasn't that weird because I was
always at my dad's studio downtown. I spent a lot of time downtown, I used to work downtown, too. He took me to Portland Brewing and said... it was in the evening and Art was there pouring pints and he says, Art my kid she came home she had been drinking Hamm's. I need to teach her what good beer is like. I'm 13! This seems crazy when I look-whatever! I would be surprised if Art remembers any of this, but Art looked around. It was busy on the sidewalk that night. It was a nice evening, kind of like one of these evenings. Art said, okay, well, 00:11:00I'll pour a half a pint. He poured a half a pint of everything he had on tap, which was probably like six half pints. He says, you can't drink it here. You have to drink it on the curb. That was the way around the serving, basically he gave the beer to my dad-whatever. Dad and I sat on the curb on whatever, I can't remember what the street is. It's where Rogue is now.TEM: 10th and Flanders?
JJ: No. It's further. It might be 14th and Glisan, something like that. It's
where Rogue, anyway. That's the original Portland Brewing facility years ago. That would have been, if I think about it, I'm 13. '76, so that would have been '90? Jesus. That was my first experience with craft beer, really. I liked it. Or maybe I liked it that I was sitting on the curb with my dad drinking it. I don't 00:12:00know. For my next birthday, which wouldn't have been too long after that, my dad gave me a home brewing kit and in those days there was a, I think it was called Oregon Scientific, you could go and get the real science stuff. Like, we got test tubes and loops to do flaming for microbiology and really good thermometers. I think it had science-y stuff. I don't know if it exists anymore, but after brewing a bunch and then you know initially with my dad's help. But my dad's kind of, okay, he might see this one day-my dad's... the way I remember it, anyway, was I got more into it than he did, but he definitely helped pursue my love of it. Because I got really into the science of it. I loved the yeast and the fermentation. My home brew store was Steinbart's which also doesn't exist anymore, but that was on 11th or something on the east side. I used to 00:13:00take the bus from West Linn when I was staying with my dad and I would get big grains of, like big sacks of grain, and take it back on the bus with me at 16 years old. I wish I could remember, because all those guys that worked at Steinbart's I loved those guys, but they threatened to card me. I remember I got so mad once because they were questioning whether they should sell me grain because I was, I think I was 16 at the time. I was like, but I'm not buying alcohol. Anyway, so a lot of kids had posters of rockstars or whatever. Mine, I got from Steinbart's was a big poster of the Wyeast. Wyeast is a brand of yeast from Hood River. They had basically the yeast number and the descriptions of what it did and the kind of beers it could be poured, attenuation and all this stuff like that. I used to look at that every night and imagine my homebrews 00:14:00that I was going to do.TEM: At that point, were you thinking about what those yeasts tasted like? How
into the sensory analysis were you?JJ: That's interesting, because they give the yeast, the flavor descriptors, and
I just assumed that that's what it would taste like and also certain yeast were matched with different styles. I was very keen on, oh I can make an ESB or I can make a Belgian, or I can make a California Steam beer, which is code for, or sorry, California Common Ale, which is code for steam beer. I got way more into the, almost like the copycat aspect of it. I can brew all these different styles of beer. I don't know, and it's-I don't know. Yeah.TEM: How did you learn about the styles? You had your poster.
00:15:00JJ: Through the poster. I'm a big reader/researcher person and so I can't
remember the name. I had, also Dad got me or we got together some magazines. It was Zymurgy back in those days and the other one, Brewing...something Brewing. I remember I had the very first issue. I had like all of them. I carried them around with me forever. I finally got rid of them a long time ago.TEM: You can use the archives here.
JJ: I can use the archives here and only people like you carry around like magazines.
TEM: You can come reminisce.
JJ: Thank you. Yeah, so I got my information from there and then also the Home
Brew Store had tons of books. Of course, I had Charlie Papazian's... um... I can't remember the name of it now, but his like, the bible of home brewing. The complete home brewer, I think.TEM: The joy of-?
JJ: The Joy of Home Brewing. Thank you. I met Charlie Papazian a few years ago
00:16:00and started crying. You changed my life! Then, yeah, his follow up book, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing. Then was it the Brewer's Association those days put out a big like series of books on all the different styles of beer. I had all those, up until recently, too. I'm like, I'm not carrying these around.TEM: I think we have those, too, if you want to reminisce.
JJ: [Laughs] I nerded out on it, big time. It was also during that time period
that I dropped out of school. It was that same age. When I went up to community college, I was mostly just going to community college because I thought I could finish high school there, but really, it was a way to just keep the household, for me, my parents, keep them satisfied. It also worked out really well for me, because I didn't have to get up at a certain time. I didn't have to go to West Linn High School. I could take whatever classes I wanted when I wanted as long 00:17:00as I was sort of-it was nice structure/not-structure for me. I started off with the intent of finishing high school there at Clackamas Community College, but then it turned out I was following some rubric to finish high school. It turns out you could take college classes and that would meet high school requirements. I placed at college for many except math, so I started taking college classes and then after a while I just, I just started taking classes I wanted to take. I didn't even care about the high school part of it. That's when I started taking biology and chemistry because I was trying to figure out how do I figure out more about this yeast thing that I had fallen into. Then after being at Clackamas Community College for three years you can only take so many classes at a place, apparently. They make you leave after a while. It was time for me to figure out the next step. The natural next step for me was Oregon State. Not 00:18:00that I even thought about it too hard, because it was almost like the easiest thing to do, because it was the school closest. I understood they had more of a science bent. I transferred here as a biochemistry major because I thought that that's how I could learn more about fermentation because at that time I think, if you had asked me what I wanted to be, I think I would have just said a brewer. I don't remember talking about it, but that's what I was into, so I wanted to learn more about yeast and fermentation, especially around brewing. So, I transferred here.TEM: Did you have friends who were into brewing with you? Were there other
people who?JJ: [Shakes head]. No. I didn't have, my friends that were closer to my age at
that time... no. Huh-uh. I tend not to have a big group of friends. I have like 00:19:00more close friends. No. I think they drank but....TEM: I was thinking, I'm trying to think of what it would have been like when I
was in high school if I had a friend who knew how to make beer. But it almost sounds like that wasn't, you weren't selling it as that. That wasn't your goal.JJ: No. I mean I hope I'm not like painting a different story on that past, but
I mean, I certainly drank and we got drunk a time or two. But it wasn't about that for me. In fact, I remember being annoyed that I had so much beer that I couldn't, because I really just wanted to make it. At a certain point, you just have too much beer. Also, bottling's a pain in the ass. I was really happy when I discovered canning at however old I was. No, but I remember I always had older friends. I remember a friend of mine got married and I made the beer for their reception. But that wasn't something I really shared with anybody. I wasn't 00:20:00until I got here, and, again, I transferred in as a biochemistry major. I lived in a big share housing thing, like a big house with a lot of people, on Western Avenue. That would have been, was that '95? So, I was 19 or 20 at the time? One of the girls, the ladies, that lived in my house knew Mina McDaniel, who was a sensory professor in the Food Science Department. I was home brewing at this house on Western here and this is before Joel's even opened, or, before Corvallis Brewing Supply opened. One of the people I lived with said, do you know they have a brewery on campus? I didn't believe her. I just straight up didn't believe Wendy. I thought, it's something else you're describing. It can't 00:21:00possibly be. She was telling me this all matter-of-factly. I probably didn't challenge her outright, but I was very suspicious and she says, oh, I know the professor. I can set up a meeting. And so, okay. Tiah, I'll be damned-they had a brewery on campus [laughs]. In this department in this building called Wiegand Hall in the Department of Food Science, which I had never heard of, which is crazy because I used, remember back in the old days when things were printed on paper, the course catalogs, you know? The Oregon State-they must still do it, but you know you could read all the different majors. To me, read all the different majors and imagining what you could be and like looking at the yeast on the wall, the descriptions, they're the same thing. Like, I'll just imagine like I'll try that on and maybe-so, I was like surprise that I hadn't noticed 00:22:00Food Science because there it was, right there, in the course catalog. Of course, it was in the College of Ag, so maybe I, I don't know. I always thought of myself as a scientist. But, I quickly changed majors. I changed majors immediately and I didn't know but that was the year that the brewery was installed.TEM: I was going to say, it probably was pretty shiny.
JJ: Yeah. It was brand new. I think I had just missed the opening ceremony, but
that's the year the Nor'Wester Endowed Professorship was there. In those days, it was Mark Daeschel who was the endowed professor of brewing. Jeff Clawson was there, Jeff who's a long-time friend of mine now. But I mean, Jeff, I think, I think Jeff started in '92 or '94. Jeff had only been there a few years. Yeah, so I was one of the first to be there. Along with the brewery there had always been a wine program. There's been a wine program in the Food Science forever. That's 00:23:00really, the fermentation option within the Food Science Major first appeared in the Oregon State Course Catalog in 1997. I think that's true. I should know that because I've been working on the curriculum lately. I think it first appeared in '97, and I graduated in '98. I was one of the first three to graduate with that area of emphasis. It's a Food Science Degree. I make that very clear because that's actually become the more important thing to me is the Food Science part, not necessarily the fermentation part. The other two that graduated at that same time: Sam Grubb who now works at Kerr Concentrates and John Kelvin [phonetic] who's now at General Mills. So, we were all beer people and none of it, well, have I gotten into beer? That's not really fair. Two of those guys are not in 00:24:00beer directly anymore.TEM: Did you feel that you had found your home? It seems like that was like
academically you were like this is what I'd been looking for?JJ: It was the best. It was, totally, it was the best. It was the best. Still to
this day those people that I met at the time-I have to remind myself and everybody that I also didn't go to high school. I mean, I went one year which basically means I didn't go to high school. I had a weird, in a way those were my high school years. I don't know, maybe it's like that for everybody that's in college, too. For me, it's all lumped together because that time and the friends and the people that I knew are still my best friends to this day. They're still-in fact, just before I got a text message from a guy I went to school with 20 years ago who's asking me about something. They're still my people that I talk to. Yeah, and just because there was my community. There were other people that wanted to make beer and wanted to nerd out about it. I remember I had keys 00:25:00to the pilot plant. Actually, that's what, ironically that's when I stopped home brewing. I didn't need to do it at home anymore, because we could do it on this scale.TEM: What was it like to be in the department? Did it feel like it was, the
option, the fermentation option, did it feel like it was forming itself? I don't know if you have the perspective, had the perspective at the time to know it?JJ: I probably don't. It's only been in retrospect now. What I do now, because
this is kind of pertinent to this, well, I'm in the penultimate day of my employment here at Oregon State. I've been here a little over two years acting as an advisor and instructor specifically for the fermentation students within the Food Science major. It's very much full circle coming back and advising 00:26:00them. Not only that, but I've been involved with looking at our fermentation curriculum and how we teach it over the last, a little over a year, myself along with the other members of the faculty who teach fermentation classes in the Food Science Department. We've been working on this. I'm like, I have a weird intimacy right now at this moment with our curriculum and looking at the history of it. For me, I don't know, for me to think about those days-I don't even think I totally understood that it was new. I think I knew it was new-ish, but you know. I don't know. At that age you kind of think everything is really solid and people have things really figured out. It seemed very solid to me. It didn't-I don't think I would have said it's forming itself. To me, it's a fully-fledged program. I mean now I know better. Now I know that, whew, things were kind of just like throw that at the wall and see what sticks. I guess it works. More 00:27:00like actually how things happen. No, to me it felt very solid.TEM: What a unique perspective, though, that that brings, this last two years
has brought to your first years here. There's the full circle, oh it's cool that there's the full circle, but also just that I imagine that it could color even how you think about those first days when you think back.JJ: Yeah. It does and it also-
TEM: Or shape your memory, I guess, in a way now. Reshape, maybe?
JJ: Yeah, I don't know. I would say it actually informs how I behave right now
in like the things I fight for with the curriculum, because in this ad-hoc fermentation curriculum meeting we've been having, and one of the reasons it was initiated, by the way, is that we've hired-the program's grown a lot. When I was 00:28:00in school it was, I think the year that I was there it was 43 undergraduates in the entire department. We're now, in the Food Science Department, like 160, 170 down from a high the year before last of close to 200, which is still it makes us a pretty tiny department on campus, but like that's an enormous amount of growth. Most of that was from the fermentation, was due to the fermentation option. We had a couple new hires: distillation faculty and then we hired a brewing microbiologist. Part of our look at the fermentation curriculum as a whole is because we're going to be integrating these new people into the program. So, for me thinking about, I had such a good experience. Not only that, but I stuck around for graduate school and then I went and worked in the alcoholic beverage industry. I had a nice experience in college and then I had 00:29:00that really nice thing happen was like, oh, wow, all that stuff that I learned in college? Really important and useful. I see why they were teaching me that now. Things you take when you're-that's the best. College is lovely. It's stupid all at the same time, right? Like, oh you're 17? Figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life. Oh, you don't know everything else in the world? Too bad, figure out a path anyway, right? Declare it. I think the most, and then you learn stuff kind of in a vacuum here, too, right? I mean, I deal with students up until a couple weeks ago, I deal with students all the time like they have no idea why they're taking organic chemistry. They figure it out when they take brewing and then all the stuff they learn when brewing they figure it out when they're actually out in a brewery. In a perfect world, you would brew a little bit out in the world and then you'd go back and you take all those courses. My perspective was having the education that I did that I thought served me really well and then using it in the boozy world and then coming back to Oregon State. 00:30:00Looking at it again, that's how I've been thinking more about it, lately. Worrying, not just the student population with the department gets bigger but as on campus it gets bigger how do you maintain the quality when there was only 40 students and now there's 200? I mean, our lab sizes are still the same, but anyway.TEM: What was the decision-why did you stay for graduate school? What did you
hope you would get out of...?JJ: My perspective on that has changed. Now, that's something that has changed
probably by time has been colored, because I also deal with students who from our undergraduate program go into graduate school. It's really caused me to think, okay, why did I stick around? I think it was just inertia. I think you get good at school and then things seem scary. It seems scary to leave. At the time, I felt like I hadn't learned enough about yeast, probably. I just wanted 00:31:00to learn more. I also kind of attribute that to not going to high school and just taking classes for the literal enjoyment of taking classes. I feel really lucky with that. That's, as an advisor, I always feel like I'm not having a shared experience with a lot of my students. They're here to get the piece of paper. Whereas for me, I didn't. School was cheaper back in those days. To me, it just seemed like I'm good at this and still more to learn, so I just stuck around. In retrospect, probably if I'd done it right I wouldn't have stuck around or I would have worked for a little bit and come back, maybe had gone to a different school, but I mean...TEM: Hindsight.
JJ: Hindsight. I mean, my life experience is what it is. I had a good graduate
school experience, too, with Dr. Mark Daeschel who is the original Nor-Wester Brewing Endowed Professor. He's more of a food safety guy now. What is his 00:32:00title? He just semi-retired recently. He's with the Process Authority for the State of Oregon, I think, or the food processing? He's one of the food safety. My master's work was cool. I always call it a party thesis. Somebody's like, "I'm studying the e-flex mechanisms of the transporters on the saccharomyces," or whatever. My thesis was I studied the effects of drinking wine with a meal to protect against food poisoning. You can talk about it at a party. People are like, really? Does it work? You know, like. So.TEM: That's pretty fascinating.
JJ: It's super cool. Weirdly, because there's not so many people that have a
fermentation on the alcoholic-by the way, Tiah, no human pathogen has ever been isolated from beer, wine, and spirits. I'm sure somebody out there would dispute it but I defy them to find the reference. So, alcoholic beverages in general 00:33:00pretty safe. Things that would grow in us are not going to grow in booze. Because of that, a lot of people who focus and specialize on the fermentation side, the food safety, especially the pathogen issues, which is most of food safety stuff, they don't get the chance to use their food safety stuff. I did, because I grew up E.coli and salmonella and now the new job I have, which I've just been in less than two weeks, is working for a kombucha producer. In a weird way marries my different parts of my background because it's fermented tea. There is some alcohol that is produced during that, but then the alcohol's removed because it's a non-alcoholic product. There are food safety concerns, potentially. It turns out with kombucha that the PH is low enough that it's not practically, it's an intrinsically safe food, but I'm getting to use all my 00:34:00safety stuff now, which is a weird thing.TEM: Did you find that if you drank alcohol it reduces your exposure?
JJ: No. Well, I mean, the studies need to be done further. What I did was,
thanks for asking by the way. I love getting asked about my master's research, which I graduated with my master's in 2001, so that's also been a few years now. But, what I found was, so I designed a model stomach system, because I didn't actually use people. That would have been way, way too much effort.TEM: And IRB clearance.
JJ: If they even had that back in those days. It's just like hey I'm taking some
students. Here, drink this. Yeah, I designed a model stomach, which sounds a lot fancier than it was. It was basically a stomach blender and they used baby food and I inoculated with salmonella, E. coli, and all these different things. I added either there was a control where it was water added. I can't remember now. 00:35:00I added wine. I looked at pinot noir or chardonnay. Then just looked at the survival of those things after a normal transit time in stomach. Yeah, very, very preliminary. There certainly was an effect, especially more against E. coli than salmonella. But, you know, it took a lot of different turns. In the beginning, I was going to start that work but then I was looking at, okay, what are just the survival of pathogens in wine, for example? It had never been done. It had never been done. That work had never been done. That's just traditional knowledge. Pathogens don't survive in wine. I couldn't find the paper. I extensively looked. Couldn't find the paper. The very first things I did was I just looked at the survival of pathogens in wine, different wines in different 00:36:00conditions, several different strains of both E. coli (O157:H7) and different strains of salmonella typhimurium, which are the two things, especially back in those days, which were getting a lot of attention for causing food-born illness. What I found was that they, you couldn't, especially for E. coli, you couldn't even sample fast enough to find them alive. Not only do they not survive they're inactivated. Mark Daeschel who was my PI, he actually took that part of the research and went on further and developed a wine-based disinfectant. We almost got a patent. We didn't get the patent because they found some prior art from like-I still don't. I think we should've got the patent. Yeah, so that was a piece of it. Just the survival of pathogens in wine, which turns out they don't. Like at all. The second piece was looking at, like, okay, what is the protective 00:37:00effect of the stomach. There could be some. I wouldn't rely on it.TEM: Well, you know. It gives you another reason for lots of reasons.
JJ: Yeah. It got picked up. It was funny, because the thesis, or the research,
which was published in the Journal of Food Science in 2013, got picked up in the popular press. It appeared in the LA Times business section. It was referenced in Playboy. So funny. They sent Mark Daeschel a copy of the magazine. Of course Mark Daeschel instantly passed that on to me [laughs]. I still have it. That one I kept. I mean, who can say they've been in Playboy for all the right reasons, right? Yeah. It was picked up in Wine Spectator and all kinds of stuff. I actually had my own research quoted back to me at like, you know how people like factoids? Well, you know you drink enough wine it will protect you against food poisoning? 00:38:00TEM: You said, I actually do know that.
JJ: I said, I was so excited. I told him, it was in Walla Walla-I used to live
in eastern Washington. It was a guy I knew. I'm like, Bill. I did that. I know that. He's like, yeah, yeah. I'm like, no. No, you don't understand. He didn't understand. No, no, no, no. You just think that's like-no, I did that.TEM: Well, to have your master's work used, too. You think about how many
master's theses are written and they are very valuable contributions. That strange cross over into the real world? Like.JJ: Yeah, totally.
TEM: I mean, beyond Playboy.
JJ: Right, right. No, it got picked up. It lends itself to like wacky news.
Researchers at Oregon State are doing. It was pretty fun.TEM: What was the department like? Who were you going to school with? Who was
00:39:00next to you in class? We were talking about demographics earlier, so it's sort of informed by that.JJ: Yeah. I mean, I tend to remember just my friends. There wasn't that many of
us. Forty of us. I'd like to see who was in those upper division classes in those days. They were, a lot of them were students that started a little bit after me who were also very interested in fermentation science. Many of them, not many of them were like me, though. I will say. They weren't like rabid home brewers who just couldn't wait to start. I mean, some of them were home brewers but at least that's where, but I mean, not like me. I've been homebrewing since I was at 14 [imitates serious, competitive disposition]. You know, like. A lot of my friends who are dudes, the male students, who wanted to make beer, they had started off in different majors. For whatever reason, there was a lot of 00:40:00chemical engineering majors who were like I got to get out of chemical engineering. What else can I take that we use all the science? Oh, I like beer. There's a few of those guys. There were some of the traditional food science students, some agriculture people. I went to school with a guy named Jason Huebsch who now works at Bolthouse Farm. I think his two younger brothers also went through the Food Science Program. I remember there was a few ag families, mostly Oregonians. Actually, in those days there was a lot of international students. We had a lot of Thai students in those days.TEM: Were they more solidly in the food science side?
JJ: Yes. Yeah. That was still the dominant.
TEM: Right, because there were three of you in the graduating.
JJ: Well, that was just in the beginning. Just three that graduated. By the time
I graduated, though, I don't know what the split was. It was difficult for me, 00:41:00because I was taking classes with the fermentation students. I mean, the proportion of fermentation students quickly rose after that fermentation option started. Yeah. I could just tick off my pals, for sure. I know where so many of them now are still. Most of them are still in food. Very few are in the alcoholic beverage industry. I only know one person who is still in beer, which is interesting. Several are in wine. Some of them are in the bigger, like food industry. I've had a few leave the food industry. It wasn't for them at all. Yeah. 00:42:00TEM: What about your memories of that time of beer produced in Oregon?
JJ: Oh yeah.
TEM: So, that would have been hitting that mid-'90s peak and the beginning of
the downturn.JJ: Definitely. So, this is, I actually had a job in like the brewing world when
I was 19. So was that the summer before I went to Oregon State? Or during that time? This colleague of my dad's started something called the Portland Brew Bus. The idea was that it was going to be geared towards tourists in that there was this weird thing: beer tourism [laughs]. It's not funny to think about now, because obviously beer tourism is completely a thing, but at that time like I hear that people are coming to Portland to taste the beer. But anyway, Dad's 00:43:00always been like a promotion guy. We're in a bus. We'll pick them up at these three hotel spots downtown and we'll take them to the microbreweries. The microbreweries we won't pay them anything, because they'll just be stoked to have customers that are there. We'll serve lunch and then we'll take them back to the hotel. I was the tour guide for the inaugural Portland Brew Bus. I didn't do it that long because I was just 19 and at 19 years old try to get a bus full of drunk people on a schedule? It was so ridiculous [laughs]. But our stops were, in those days the beer scene, there weren't that, I mean now, to me it seemed like a lot at the time. Now, in retrospect, it wasn't that much. In Portland, obviously Bridgeport. Was Bridgeport? We didn't even go to Bridgeport, 00:44:00but obviously, I think Bridgeport's the first microbrewery in the state. We went to Widmer. They had just at that time opened up their facility on the east side of the river, so over there at the interstate. That was new. That was a fun stuff. We went to Portland Brewing, their industrial facility. Not the closer one. We went to Weinhard's [takes deep breath]. Weinhard's: oldest continuously operated brewery west of the Mississippi until they foolishly. It still kills me because Weinhard's like I used to work downtown, just a few blocks away from the brewery and you could smell the beer and it just always made me so happy. Then, I think we went to Nor'Wester. Nor'Wester was still extant at that point. So, we went there, too. That was, so Bridgeport, Widmer... oh, we didn't go to Full 00:45:00Sail on that tour, but Full Sail, obviously, was a player based in Hood River, of course, but they had their taproom on the river.TEM: River Place?
JJ: River Place, yeah. Who else was in town? Those are what I remember.
Obviously, Rogue was around.TEM: That would be, yeah, so '93, '94?
JJ: Mm-hmm.
TEM: So, I guess that's just before the kind of second wave.
JJ: Just before, because that still felt like things weren't ticking along. I
mean that was before Nor'Wester shut down and they were still expanding. I think they bought an old label called Star. There was some brewery there that was going to produce under this old label. Then, I remember that place closed. I don't even know what years those were. It was kind of, so, for me, I was really, really into beer. Also, I was a crazy home brewer and remember I judged a home 00:46:00brewing competition. I was 20. I wasn't even old enough to drink, God! Oh! Heart of the Valley Homebrewing Club here in town, they changed their bylaws so that I could be a member because I wasn't old enough. Once I got into graduate school and then my research was more focused around wine. I kind of you know maybe just the natural progression of things. I paid attention to the brewing world, but it became less important to me. I think that coincided with a lot of those places closing and then I went and worked my main job when I graduated Oregon State with the master's is I went and worked a year at Ste. Michelle's as an intern, but then my real big girl job was I worked for a company called Scott Laboratories, which is based in Bay Area in California. They're a distributor of 00:47:00goods and services to the beer, wine, and spirits industries. Most of their business is in wine, but they had a huge, long history with filtration beer. Then also brewing equipment on the filtration side, not brew houses and that kind of thing, but on the filtration side. I remember when I first started working for them, which would have been 2002, there was a lot of used equipment on the market. It became really apparent that the brewing industry was struggling. That was my view of it at the time was on the supplier side. I mean, now we're all wondering when it's going to happen again, because there's so many breweries now. There was a few bellwethers. It used to be that you could, even here, a few years ago used brewing equipment goes as fast as it's on the market. 00:48:00There was a time like that, too, in those days and then there was just a glut of it.TEM: Did you, so you did your internship, the winery was in Washington?
JJ: Mm-hmm. Eastern Washington, yeah.
TEM: Did you think that you wanted to stay in wine making at that time or were
you just kind of-? JJ: Do you know, I never really had an idea about a career. Again, this something I've been thinking about as I'm advising undergraduates and giving them career advice and being very sympathetic when they don't have any idea. I just wanted to do, well, I was never that determinate about it. I took the internship at Ste. Michelle because my girlfriend who had graduated a year before I did she was an enologist there and they had lost their lab manager just before harvest. I was married to my first husband at the time and he and I 00:49:00were, it was rocky. That's why he's my first husband and no longer my current husband. I probably took that job because it was there. It was a way for me to put on pause a personal situation. It was whatever. It was related to fermentation and good, right? I didn't think about it too much. Then I got the job at Scott Laboratories, which I would have never even thought would have been something I was interested in. Also, it was in California! My God, can you believe it! What's a nice Oregonian girl like me doing in California?TEM: [Laughs] Just hope you didn't bring any back with you, any California.
JJ: Gah! No, yeah. But I found out about that job because that was a, it turned
out to be a technical sales rep kind of a job. But it was definitely a company that sold stuff to other places and, I don't know, being brought up in this scientist or maker kind of environment that I was in, I probably still struggle 00:50:00with the sales bit a little bit. I certainly would have never thought that was an option. That job, I found out about because my mentor, Mark Daeschel, he knew the people and they had contacted him and I basically contacted Scott Laboratories as a courtesy to Mark Daeschel. That one in and of itself, was kind of I just did it. It turned out to be a good move for me, but it wasn't one that I chose.TEM: What was it like to live in California? Did you live in the Bay Area proper?
JJ: I did. Well, I don't know if it's called-I lived in Sonoma County. I lived
in Petaluma.TEM: Okay.
JJ: Which is about 30 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, up 101. Yeah, I
think it's solidly considered Bay Area, but it's such a big-I mean, there's eight million people in the Bay Area. That was, being a recently divorced 00:51:0024-year-old [laughs], living in California. It was fun. Just a job for me at the time. I used to joke, boy if I could just have a job where I traveled around and talked about fermentation that'd be like the perfect job. Be careful what you wish for, because you might have a job where you travel around and talk about fermentation. I traveled a bunch. I think of it now as being a kid. You were saying before this started that adolescence apparently goes to 24. Yeah, I was still-TEM: Your brain was almost formed.
JJ: My brain was almost formed. I do look back on those days and think I was
kind of a, I was still a kid then. Traveling a ton and yeah it was living, yeah it was fun. It was stressful, being away from home. I left in 2002, so I graduated in 2001 with my master's and I moved to Washington and then I moved to California. I didn't move back to Oregon until two years ago. I would have never 00:52:00thought that would have happened. I always thought that was a, oh this is a lark. I'll do this and then eventually I'll get back home, and it didn't work like that. But California was fun at the time. It's an expensive place to live, and I find that people there, there's kind of a need for the façade to have the cool, laid back thing, because it's California. I'm like, we're cool. We're laid back. We're, it's a culture. It's a lifestyle, but boy it's pretty stressful to make ends meet. I remember after the first couple months I lived there, I just couldn't figure out why I was tense. There's just more shopping carts in the aisles and there's just more cars on the road. Even though, in retrospect, and I really like the town of Petaluma, I never thought, I never woke up and was like, oh I'm home. I always woke up and was like, oh, in California. Whereas now I 00:53:00don't wake up and think, I'm in Oregon. Right? I'm just here.TEM: How long did you live there?
JJ: I lived there twice with the same company. So, all in total maybe four
years? Maybe four years? Yeah.TEM: Petaluma. I don't know now whether the sprawl of the Bay Area has met with
Petaluma, but I remember late '90s, early 2000s. It was still decently rural.JJ: Yes.
TEM: So, you still felt like-
JJ: It's rural-ish, especially by California standards. It was the hen egg
capital of the world, or something like that, Petaluma was. Yeah, still pretty rural. I mean, again, I lived there a couple times. I lived there in 2002 and then I lived there again in 2011? Was it that recent? 2010? I may be getting the time a little bit squiggy. It doesn't feel urban. It feels like suburban. It's 00:54:00between, Petaluma's between Santa Rosa, and Santa Rosa's like 100,000 plus people? So, 101's busy. It's pretty busy. I was there, obviously, for my job, but it's also smack dab in the middle of wine country. I became really involved in wine country. My own personal job, I mean, I was all over California. I myself would go to the foothills and remote places, central coast, central valley. I was very involved in the wine industry and it turns out that those industries are agricultural based and are in agricultural areas that can be remote.TEM: Did you ever feel drawn to Davis for like a, you ended up back as an
academic advisor. Were you thinking even in the mid-2000s that you wanted to end 00:55:00up back in a university? Or was there a sort of draw to Davis?JJ: Yeah, I did. I did think I wanted to go back to school. I did go back to
school, but I didn't go to Davis. No, I never had much of a draw to Davis. I don't know. It was interesting, because there were several of my professors at Oregon State who had come from Davis, notably Barney Watson, who was the state enologist for Oregon and based in the Food Science Department since 1976 until he retired after I was in school. I still, Barney's still around. I love Barney. He was from Davis, and Alan Bakalinsky, he went to Davis. Tom Shellhammer went to Davis, but Tom wasn't there when I was in school. But, no, because wine was never, I mean I definitely associate Davis with wine, actually beer, too, I guess for the master brewer program and all that. But, if I had had thoughts at 00:56:00that time about going to do more schooling related to fermentation it would have been Heriot-Watt, because they actually have a program called Brewing and Distillation, which I've now just since found out our program's probably a lot better than theirs, but whatever. It's actually called brewing and distillation. No, I wasn't. I kind of had a bias against Davis in a way. I dealt with a lot of wine makers in those days, and so the big schools for wine, if that's the way somebody came to a winemaker position, which I should say people don't always necessarily have an educational specific path to wine, but it would have been Davis and San Luis Obispo and Fresno and then sometimes from Washington State and then our program. Our program was still pretty young at that time. The 00:57:00Davis, there was a whole thing for a whole while that you couldn't get a job at a prestigious Napa winery unless you had a degree from Davis. There was a weird Davis clique. Often, I don't know. I'm making broad generalizations about people, which I shouldn't do, but just in, I guess I'll do it anyway.TEM: [Laughs].
JJ: So, at least the people that I had seen that came out of that program there
may be new specific techniques around wine but they didn't seem like they knew their deep science as well. So, I never had any aspirations to go to Davis. After I lived in the Bay Area and my job at that company changed slightly. I moved to eastern Washington for a second time, because I interned out there. I moved to Walla Walla, Washington and worked out there at that time. After being out there a few years I thought, I'm so tired of helping retired dentists like 00:58:00fuss over their two barrels of cabernet. There's got to be something more important than this, you know? I really wanted to do something more intentional and more important. I always thought that was school, and it kind of goes back to that thing, well, I could get good school and it seems-also, school's so lovely, because if you do this, this, and this you will achieve this. That does not exist necessarily in the other parts of the world. There's something so satisfying about that, you just tick all these boxes. At that time I thought, I'm going to go back and I really want to be a professor because I liked the teaching aspects of my job. I liked science, and I always thought I wanted to do more research. So, I did go back to school. I did a year plus at the University of Georgia because they have a really strong Food Safety Program. Because Food Safety, that was the other part of my master's. That's more important than 00:59:00booze. The other thing is so they have a good Food Safety School there. They're also in the South where it's warm, and there had been a couple really tough winters in Walla Walla. So, I went to the University of Georgia for about a year and a half, but then I realized it wasn't for me.TEM: That's a, again, that kind of difference in culture difference and
orientation to the ocean.JJ: Totally.
TEM: That's quite a big change.
JJ: Totally. It was fun. I mean, again, like I knew it was all temporary, so I
never thought it was going to settle there. I also spent quite a bit of time in New Orleans in my life and so I made the mistake of thinking, well, I've been to the south. I know what it's like. I'd never really been to Georgia, but whatever. It's all the same, right? It's like people here, are you from Portland? I used to be in Vancouver, B.C. Okay, it's kind of close. Not really. It's like, but whatever. I made the same mistake. Georgia was very different. 01:00:00But, really, for me being so culturally West Coast was a good, good experience to see how, to just even understand the West Coast is culturally different. You could theoretically or rationally know it but to viscerally understand, like, oh. I remember, so I lived in two places in Georgia, married to my second husband at the time. Lived in Athens, which is the main campus. Athens is a college town and it's sort of the safety valve on the State of Georgia. It's pretty liberal, too, I guess. After I did my, because of the way the program was set up, I did a year of Ph.D. level coursework in Athens and then I moved to this little, tiny town called Griffin which is where the Center for Food Safety is, which is just south of Atlanta, like an hour 20, hour and a half drive. 01:01:00Moved into a house, and we had neighbors and a very nice couple with young kids. They invited us over for dinner. So we brought a bottle of wine, of course. Actually it was wine we had made when we were living in eastern Washington. The couple didn't open the wine and it's like, how can you possibly talk to strangers if there's no like, a glass of wine. That's when I realized, only are there political, like cultural things, but also just there's some things around alcohol, for example. I didn't know that there was a big swath of people down there that there was like two kinds of drinkers: abstainers and falling over drunk, and there wasn't anything in the middle. Finally, we're at these people's house, and I'm using it as an example of this kind of thing, but it happened, it was representative of what was happening, after a while it was like, you know, 01:02:00do you mind opening that bottle of wine. They kind of got, and they were like our age. They were cool. The guy sold mountain bikes. It was like, they were like well, maybe after the kids go to bed. The kids went to bed and they never opened the wine. That's when I came to realize it's just a completely different even thing around alcohol. While we were there we voted on something to do with the liquor store being able to be open on a Saturday or Sunday. I can't remember what it was. It was just some arcane thing, like really? I think we're pretty arcane to have liquor stores. I have to go to my special store and my special booze. Like, it's already creepy.TEM: It's interesting, though, to have grown up in a household where your dad
bought you a home brewing kit and then to go to that kind of, not opposite 01:03:00extreme, but to have those extremes in approach towards alcohol.JJ: Yeah, and for me, because I was raised Seventh Day Adventist, and Adventists
don't drink, by and large. They don't even eat meat, right? They don't wear jewelry-no fun, but I was kind of used to the teetotalling aspect of things but to be teetotaling without a religious reasons? It was all fear-based. That's my interpretation of it anyway, was that people who drank, drank in bars and they got too drunk and they were out of control. There was no social drinking. There was no in between. I thought, wow. Now, actually, it's interesting. I think there were two or three microbreweries in Georgia at that time. There was Sweetwater and there was Terrapin, I'm sure there was maybe a couple more, but not hardly any. I mean half a dozen, maybe. Half a dozen breweries in a whole 01:04:00giant state. What is wrong with those people? But now, if you look at them. I think things are changing, because I mean, but for me, that's what I would say, like, boy if I was going to open a brewery or winery for that matter, wouldn't do it out west. I would do it in West Virginia or some place, because people like beer and they like that experience.TEM: It is interesting. I mean, I guess they gave up the social aspect and I
think that's something that's so special about brew pub culture, is that it's not, you can have a small half pint. You can bring your kids. It feels like that kind of restrictive model that you're talking about.JJ: Yes.
TEM: I wonder how those kids drink [laughs], that kind of fear-based around alcohol.
JJ: Yeah. So, I've also had, and to me living out here it's why I like
McMenamins so much. McMenamins to me typifies that it's a great place to meet 01:05:00with your friends. I'm not selling McMenamins. That was part of the beer culture when I was a youngster, too. I kind of forget about them because I think of them because I think of them more like beer pubs, but I used to love getting a Nebraska Street Bitter. Yeah, so, to have that, you're right, that pub kind of culture. Even out west, I think we've developed it better over the last 20 years than it was when I was younger. I think this because I've also lived in London during the last however many years that I was living in London up until a couple years ago as a housewife.TEM: How did you, I love your CAMRA stories, so I do look forward to us getting there.
JJ: [Laughs].
TEM: So, I'm guessing that there wasn't a moment where you thought, hey let's
stay in the South? JJ: No. Although I liked it and we had very good friends that are there still. Actually, my friend, shout out to Brian Waters. I was an older 01:06:00than average student. I went from being a younger-than-average student my first go around in college to being an older-than-average. Like, I had thought it had just been a few years since I had been in college. No! They were so young, Tiah. I think it helped prep me for this job now, but there was one other oldster that was there with me. He was actually a year younger than me. I liked to lord that over him. I was taller and... was I taller? No. But it was definitely older. His name was Brian Waters. Fantastic guy from outside of Atlanta. I'm going to get the town wrong-McDonough. I think he's from McDonough. He'll tell me later on if I'm right or wrong, or Conyers? Anyway, Brian had gone, we were both in the Ph.D. program at the same time. He had never really left the state of Georgia. He had been out of the state once. But he had been a high school teacher and 01:07:00he'd gone back. I really liked Brian a lot. I had gone out to Georgia ahead of my husband. This was in the time before Donald had come out. There was a pub kind of thing in Athens, Georgia. It was brand new but it was one of these things that looked like an old English pub, right? They had pretty good food and they had these beers on tap. They had a really decent beer selection. I took Brian there once. I bought him a beer and I think the pint was like a $7 beer. Brian was like, I've never had a $7 beer before. He couldn't believe that. That guy, Brian, now teaches a huge online class at the Ohio State University. I think it's something like, Introduction to Beers, Wines, and Spirits. He's now like the beer guy and I would like to take all the credit for it.TEM: [Laughs].
JJ: [Laughs].
TEM: That was $7 well spent.
JJ: $7 well spent. You're welcome, Ohio. Anyway, so, it was never the plan to
01:08:00stay in Georgia. But like I said I do have some good pals from those days, from being there. Temporary. Sorry, you were going somewhere with that.TEM: No! No, no, no, no. Did you go back to California before going to London?
JJ: Yes, actually briefly. Good memory. So, yeah, I went back, yeah, so after I
realized that Georgia and being an academic in that program-I was studying viruses, by the way, norovirus, which was really interesting but the life of an academic research world I realized wasn't for me, especially in that setting-that was timed well with getting back in contact with some contacts of mine at Scott Labs who I had always worked for. I took a job back with them where I was selling marketing bottling equipment and our big customers in those days were distilleries. I got involved in the distillery side of the world, but 01:09:00yeah, did move back to Petaluma for a little while, a little over a year before I gave up my job and moved to London because my husband took a secondment, as the English would say. They have these lovely words that you don't know what they mean, but a secondment is when you, it's like a sabbatical, I think, for a professional. He was working for HSBC at the time and they made him an offer that he couldn't refuse and then myself by extension: either you lose your job and you get this big severance pay or you can move to London all expenses paid for two years and work here. Then at the end of that you may or may not have a job. I almost didn't go. I almost stayed. I almost stayed in California at my job because I'm a person that works in the world. Then I thought, ah. What the hell? We don't have kids. What are we all here for if you can't just like...? 01:10:00Also, London? Two years turned into three, almost three out there and we lived in the middle of London, at the very middle. I thought in the beginning, because I had a visa. I could have worked. It freaked everybody out. Like, you have a visa. I chose not to work, but it happened so abruptly that I didn't necessarily have time to build connections over there and to figure out who knew who over there.For me, work-wise... to be fair, I didn't have to work. I always joked that we
stole some nice English couple's lives where he's a banker. He puts on these really fancy shoes and he goes to Canary Wharf every day and I wake up and I make him coffee and I help him with his tie and then I do the housework. It was a weird thing, but the industries that I had been in primarily at that point, the wine industry, didn't really exist, especially my side of it, didn't really 01:11:00exist in the UK. Then on the food sciences, so I have access to all that, but I didn't know anybody and I hadn't really worked in those fields. It just turned out that I didn't work. Then I thought I would get involved. I got all this free time, so, I'll either learn a foreign language or I will be a docent at the National Gallery or maybe I'll help volunteer for some charitable organization. I did none of those things. I joined the Campaign for Real Ale, CAMRA; the London Cocktail Society run by my friend Emma Stokes who just released a book called, The Periodic Table of Cocktails I think (it just got released in the states)-so, Campaign for Real Ale, London Cocktail Society, Institute of Brewing and Distilling, and the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society. Those are the organizations 01:12:00I joined. None of them very charitable, except maybe the CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale [laughs], those guys. So, I'm going to tell my CAMRA story now, because I love those guys. When I was a kid, when I was a home brewer, I always knew about the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), because at some point I read that they were the most successful lobbying group that had ever been on the planet. What they were successful lobbying for were like proper pints. There were several things, and I'm going to get it wrong and I'll probably get angry emails after this. They had measures on the pint, so that means when you go and get your pint the landlord cannot screw you, you get your full measure. That's one of the things. They also basically also saved real ale, which is a definition that they came up with that has, it's maybe here in the states what we would call cask conditioned ale, but there's even more rules on it, which I really want to go 01:13:00into the nerdy details of but I'm not going to. So, real ale, so they saved real ale, which is a style of beer that is indigenous to that island. What else?TEM: Do they have anything to do with saving pub culture?
JJ: They do now. They do now, and actually that's the part that I got involved
with with them. By the time, so as a kid I just knew that this organization with the cask real ales, you know the cask ales, or real ales, these guys are all about beer. So, when I moved to London, because Donald moved ahead of me and I moved sometime after. I did two things almost immediately when I landed. I bought tickets for the Olympics, because the Olympics were starting in 2012, or the Olympics were starting in a couple years, and I signed us up, I made both of us members for the Campaign for Real Ale west London branch, because that was our branch. I had no idea what I was getting myself involved in. I went to the 01:14:00first meeting. The guys must have had, there was something going on almost every week. There would be the regular meeting once a month. Then, there was like these pub surveys that they would do once a month, or it'd be another week. I feel like there was something else that was going on. I went along to one of these just I got the welcome email and I went along. I thought, awesome, we're going to be saving real ale. What I found out was that they saved the real ale. They absolutely saved it. I mean, there was a time where you couldn't find anything on cask. They had a similar problem to what we did. The big guys came in. It was all Stella Artois or whatever it was. The beers that they were trying to save were being pushed out. But they basically-the organization was started I think in the very early '70s, like 1971 or 1972.Basically, they achieved their mission and I always used to joke they were kind
01:15:00of mission-less, you know. Their mission morphed into saving pubs, which I wish I just had the numbers at the ready. You can't even believe the number of pubs that are in the UK, because it's so integral to their culture and it makes sense because pub stands for public house. It really did used to be the public area where people came to do their business. There was meeting rooms and it would be people's living rooms. As society has changed, the pubs are being lost. I think that there's kind of this fine balance of-and this is me talking personally-a balance of just like what's normal changes with culture and then pubs that really should be saved. After the great fire of 1966 in London, even before then-the way the city was platted. If that's a house, that's a house. If that's 01:16:00a pub, that's a pub. If that's a marketplace or whatever, that's a marketplace. That's how it is in the hundreds and hundreds of year old plat and it can't be changed, right? So, that's why if you're in London the pub is 500 years old, it probably hasn't been that name or hasn't been the same family that's owned it but yeah, it's because that's a pub.TEM: So, it's like zoned for that type of purpose?
JJ: Yes. It's zoned for it and that's because of the way that city was and how
it worked you needed a pub every so often because that was the public house. That's how it was a community. So, and I can speak to London more than I can the other areas of the UK, but in London what started to happen is there's so much pressure on the real estate that there's a building that's slated, or, yeah a building that's being a pub but the money you could make turning that into apartments or something else is like-or turning it into a little supermarket or something, ridiculous, right? They've been CAMRA's been really involved in 01:17:00fighting to save those kinds of things from happening, from converting those things that should be pubs to restaurants. It's kind of a fight because there's some things that are just, well, it's really people aren't using it anymore and it's for us as Americans it's like a weird, like, we're kind of about the free market. Anyway, but in order for them to have their mission, so yeah, the mission of CAMRA has really changed from saving real ale to saving pubs, pubs that serve real ale. They're not saving all the places, mind you. Part of that is a lot of surveys of pubs. A lot of surveys of pubs. You wouldn't think that'd be so awful, but there's a lot of pubs. In my branch alone there was 863 pubs that served real ale [laughs]. Pubs that had hand pumps, right? Anyway, I get 01:18:00involved with these guys.TEM: That's even not all of London. That's just the-
JJ: No! That's just, it was just my branch. I can't remember how many branches
are in the greater London area.TEM: That's crazy.
JJ: Eight, maybe. It's insane. It's insane.
TEM: Like, that's a lot.
JJ: It's a lot. I meet these guys. I met them, so a place, the Grape and Hand or
something. I should know. I go very naively go to meet my branch for the first time. I don't realize it's what I'm doing. I'm just going to show up at a meeting. It's me, I drug my husband along, Donald, and I can almost, five guys and CAMRA members, they're basically-the organization started in early '70s and that's about the age of all those guys. They were young men when they joined. They're still members and so and CAMRA members will joke about this: they're all like kind of hairy (eh, kind of like Oregonians), kind of hairy, pensioners. But they became my best mates. My best mates were 70-year-old retired men who could 01:19:00drink beer in the middle of the day because who else would I hang out with? But, they were, so I became involved with them. I was very unusual: female made me unusual. Quite a bit younger than everybody, even though I'm not that young [laughs], and American. But because I was a housewife and that became my community service there. I surveyed a lot of pubs. That's very important, Tiah, because CAMRA also puts out these big books about like the best pubs in London or just a complete guide to pubs in London. Somebody's got to go around and make notes, like does this pub have newspapers? Is the music too loud? How many taps do they have? Is there handicap parking? So, they allow children after 4:00 pm? Somebody's got to go around and talk to Mrs. Roxie Beaujolais at the Seven Stars and document this stuff. 01:20:00TEM: How many pubs would you go to in a day if you were surveying? Like what was
a good day?JJ: Okay, so there was different, if I was doing it on my own [laughs]. That
just made me laugh. Do you know how not fun going to surveying pubs is by yourself? You wouldn't think that. It's much more fun to do it with a group of people. So, if I was with the guys and, in fact, what Donald and I that first one we went on was one of those group surveys where they were like, we're going to take W 1-2, which is a post code or whatever it is, we're going to look at this section. We're going to go to Kingston and we're going to go this. That would just be an evening after work. With the guys: five or six. It'd be like a little, it wasn't even, it was like a mile. A totally small area to even walk around in. On my own, because it actually turned out that it wasn't that fun, so, we were just doing that survey for our own internal records, that kind of 01:21:00thing. Then there was the big CAMRA book that gets put out annually. I can't remember what it's called, but it's like the survey of the best pubs in England. Our branch would put forward what we considered to be the best pubs for whatever reason. Then we had to go and do a deep survey of those, because that's what was going to appear in the big book. I was there several years enough to see the process a couple times. I would volunteer, I thought in the beginning, sure I'll go volunteer and survey pubs. It was not fun, because you're bothering the landlord. First of all, they're asking why am I asking them if they have television on. You know everybody's having beers and I'm like okay [imitates taking notes]. Sometimes I don't even get a pint because I'm feeling too weird 01:22:00about it. I helped do that, and then also, a big part of what my branch did was deliver this magazine called The London Drinker, a little glossy thing, that I should have kept a copy, so nerdy. They would just have pub openings and closings and they had listings for pubs in there but they had very specific like abbreviations and acronyms for things. If you didn't really know what a normal person looking at it, it's like indecipherable. It was just very nerdy happenings at local pubs and so one of the older gentlemen in my branch, Major Paul, Paul Gray [phonetic], lovely fellow, lived right behind the Cleveland Arms. Had a beautiful art collection. He had some like homeostasis issues and he just refused to believe it and so the other members were always trying to get 01:23:00him to stop doing stuff. I took over part of his route for The London Drinker.Actually, in doing that, too, I did it anyway because I wanted to help the guys,
but you think deliver the little magazines called The London Drinker around to different pubs in your neighborhood. My neighborhood was Soho, Fitzrovia, like I mean the middle of London and I hated it because the barmen were always like, basically like delivering trash to their places of establishments. But I did it because it meant that Major Paul wasn't going to fall over while he was delivering them. So, I helped them deliver The London Drinkers and then probably the thing that they gave me a plaque for, which I will cherish for forever, is CAMRA HQ, or I don't even know what the national thing is called, but they were always giving directives and the guys were always like, arrg! Mind you, these were pensioners. The chairman of the branch, Lez Mags [phonetic], he got a cell phone since I knew him. He didn't do email at all, and then he showed me a cell 01:24:00phone and it was like one of the elderly ones with the big buttons and he had it in a Ziploc bag. I'm like, that's cool Lez! That's a cool cell phone! You know, like really technologically not savvy. One of the things CAMRA HQ made them do is they had to upload all that survey data from all their pubs in this database. I somehow thought that I could do that. Like, I'll do it! I did do it, but it took me, it was a big project and now I have a weird knowledge of West London pubs. I've seen all their names. I've done, like tracked things down is that a duplicate. Where is that one? Is that really the right address? Or is that still a real ale? Is that one closed? Anyway, I kind of coordinated the effort to [laughs] help them fulfill their mission so much so that when I left they presented me with a plaque at their annual Christmas-do and was thanking me for 01:25:00all my help, for helping their pubs, their database.TEM: If I remember correctly-you know the guy, what's the cranky guy logo on the
CAMRA, on their advertisements? Maybe we weren't talking about this. He looks like, it was on the CAMRA, I think it was just the CAMRA America chapter, but it was this like sort of line drawing of this guy who just looks cranky. I'll scan it for you and send it to you.JJ: Hmmm, CAMRA America? What is the point?
TEM: Because they had some like, well, maybe they were defining real ale more broadly.
JJ: Oh, I wonder if it was... I don't know. I don't remember us having this
conversation. I don't know if I know the cranky CAMRA guy. They're all cranky CAMRA guys.TEM: Well, I think it was not a caricature. It was a line drawing cartoony
looking representative, but he has a name. 01:26:00JJ: Oh.
TEM: I'll send it to you.
JJ: I don't know.
TEM: He has a name. I would just be making stuff up if I remembered what his
name was. What about microbrew culture in London? Did you feel like was there a, it's a country that's so steeped in tradition. We have this campaign to preserve exactly how things are...?JJ: Yeah, so that's a really interesting question, because I kind of saw that
collision like as it was happening, right? One of the things that CAMRA really struggles with is getting new members. There's a whole like young CAMRA. They really try to encourage it, but they're not attracting the young people. Who is attracting the young people in the UK is there is a craft brew movement, which was so funny and cute to me when I first moved there. I'm like, oh you have a little craft brewery, like it's just such a weird thing because it's such a place steeped in beer culture. But, the thing about the old country is that 01:27:00they're very steeped in tradition, and especially guys like the CAMRA guys like beer has to be made in this very weirdly strict way. Then they'll go to Belgium and they'll drink and enjoy all kinds of wacky stuff that happens in Belgium, but not apply it to their beer. I think they really alienated the younger generations a lot who are exploring new beer styles. So, yeah, I would say places like Brew Dog, which is, it feels like an American thing, but it's kind of edgy. It was started in Edinburgh, I think. They have like interesting labels and interesting names of their beers and they're doing-it feels more like what we do, like pushing hop levels and stuff like that. The guys hated Brew Dog, like my guys hated it. Yet, that's where, those are the new beer drinkers in 01:28:00your country. Definitely, at least what I observed, it was an active part of the industry but very small and growing. Brew Dog, Mean Time was in London. I'm forgetting the rest of it. I say that, but then my branch there was a couple of new microbreweries in my branch, was a geographical region, which I'm going to forget now, but we would sometimes have our meetings at these small microbreweries. CAMRA would try to support them in that way, but it was always a very strange dynamic, because they weren't really doing traditional cask ale, necessarily, which is what the old guys wanted, but definitely you saw more pubs with more like variety of craft ales at the market sometimes you'd see that, too. But very small, still. It's strange. 01:29:00TEM: What about their view of American beer? Was there a wild, crazy, West Coast
brew culture? Did they think of us as Budweiser drinking? Like what was...?JJ: Okay, I'm trying to remember. I think that they were, okay... my group was a
little bit skewed. We're talking about the old guys, right? The old CAMRA guys. They were almost totally unaware that there was like a-I remember I was constantly saying I come from a place of beer culture. They didn't really, that wasn't on their radar. Why would it be? They live in London. What did they care about Portland, Oregon, or Oregon, whatever, or even the West Coast? Really, you didn't even see, the beers that you would see from the states would be like Budweiser. But they'd think that was kind of expensive compared to other stuff. You didn't really see American beers very often. At the big festivals, like the Great British Beer Festival, there'd be like an American section, you know? 01:30:00Which was always hilarious to me, like little tiny-it's so awesome, like a little tiny American section. Hey! [imitates waving a greeting] Oh, you guys are English. Yeah, so actually that was, it's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but I do remember it wasn't on their radar.TEM: I think because we talk about it as if we are-
JJ: As if everybody knows about it.
TEM: Yeah. How could you not know about Portland?
JJ: Right. But, well, just-
TEM: Don't you know about Portland?
JJ: Right, or just the West Coast. Like, you know, like, I was always saying,
like, yeah, so I'm into beer because of where I live. I think Oregon still has rights to the most microbreweries per capita. I don't know, but for them they were not aware of that. What was also interesting to me, because I do come out of a home brewing culture, where I was really involved in homebrewing competitions and that kind of thing, the real ale festivals, like the guys that were nerding out about their real ales and they have the books and they make all these notes against all the beer, like as some crazy scavenger hunt, compared to 01:31:00the home brew guys: same people. Same people but just in England where home brewing wasn't a thing. They're just and there's a lot of beer. They were drinking beer. Put that guy from England, put him here, that guy would have been home brewing out and nerding out on this form of beer. That's to me what I noticed is they were like the same. I was hanging out with the same kind of people but different manifestations. But then the young people, that was a totally different thing.TEM: Well, and I guess, that's probably the truth for any evolving culture, that
you have the traditionalists.JJ: What's so funny about CAMRA, though, is they started off being the young,
they were all those people. That's how that organization started, and it's interesting. It was fun for me to be kind of like on the outside looking in and yet being like, Donald would come home: what'd you do today? I'm like, oh I went 01:32:00on a pub walk with Alan and Paul. We went to Hampstead Heath. We went up to the Holly Bush and like, what? Or we'd be going to one and I'd be like, oh I've been to that pub. Donald's like, when did you go to that pub? I'm like, well, you know it was Wednesday last week, and [shows exasperated gesture]. By the way, if you're ever going to London, let me know.TEM: You'd give the ultimate walk.
JJ: I don't know anything about, oh yeah go to the British Museum, whatever. But
I can tell you the three pubs that are like within three blocks.TEM: So, you came back in 2015? 2014?
JJ: Yeah. So very end of 2014, so I basically started, and I came back to take
the job here at Oregon State. I started back January 2, 2015.TEM: What was it like to return? So you'd been gone for a long time.
JJ: Yeah, and I think it was living in London where I was like, okay, I need to
move home. Like, home, home. I loved-I mean we just talked about pub culture and 01:33:00things like that in London. I liked living in Europe because I also had access to, I went on beer vacations, Tiah. Who can go to Prague for the weekend? You can if you live in London. You can just like go drink pilsner all weekend or go to Bruges for the weekend and drink Belgian beer. I enjoyed my time over there, but I also got really homesick in a way that I couldn't have even imagined. It wasn't just like I needed to move back to the states. I needed to move back to Oregon. I was like, alright enough already. I keep thinking I'm going to move back home, and I haven't. It was nice. And, I should mention this, I found out about the job that I eventually got from Tom Shellhammer, who is the brewing professor at Oregon State, because he was in town, because he's an examiner for the IBD and he had some meeting, but he had some time. He also knew that I lived 01:34:00there and I always had time, because [laughs].TEM: Unless it was a Wednesday.
JJ: Because I was a housewife. Tom used to come through London pretty regularly
and he actually stayed with us a few times. So he had said, hey I'm going to be in London these days. Are you available? If so, are there are any breweries that you want to go see? Get technical tours that you haven't? I said, actually, we've had our annual general meeting at Fuller's, which is a very old famous brewery in Chiswick right on the Thames. We've had our meeting there a few times. I'd never had a technical tour. He says, okay I'll set it up. Tom and I, the tube was striking that day, so we took a double decker bus and Tom and I were the only people in the middle of the day on the top of this double decker bus on our way to Fuller's Brewery when the job came through on his phone. He's like, oh you should apply for this. I'm like, okay, whatever.Anyway, a year later I take the job at Oregon State in the Food Science
Department as a fermentation instructor and advisor. So, coming back, yeah 01:35:00coming back was, it was strange because the last time I'd been at Oregon State I'd been a graduate student and was performing graduate duties. I was a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant, sorry, for the food analysis class. After all those years and living abroad I come back and I was a teaching assistant for the food analysis class [laughs]. It was a very weird thing, like no time has passed. Like, I'm in my department. There's still many of the same professors that I've always worked with. I'm doing similar things. Honestly, in the beginning I was like what happened?TEM: And Wiegand doesn't look any different.
JJ: Wiegand's no different. The labs are a little cleaner, believe it or not.
But yeah, by and large, it's not changed. I came back, yeah, I mean I feel like 01:36:00with my different careers I never really found the right thing. I thought, oh, this will be fantastic because it's like a department I like and how cool would that be to advise students that are like the student I was 20 years ago. It was very nice to come home. It was a little bit surreal to come back, and it felt many times like I was doing exactly the thing that I was doing. I swear to God, I've had a life. But yeah, and I was helping out with the brewing class. I was on the brewing analysis and food analysis class that very first few months when I got back.TEM: Did you feel any pulls towards like maybe you wanted to finish a Ph.D.
here, teach here?JJ: Teaching, yeah. You mean before I came back?
TEM: No. I guess I was thinking, you're back in that kind of education
01:37:00environment. It's certainly going to school and working full-time is not a breeze, going to school to get a Ph.D., but did you think about staying in academia in a more permanent way? I guess you've been here two years, so it's not like you've bounced in and out in six weeks.JJ: Yeah, I thought, I've always been drawn to academics, obviously, because I
went back to school at some point and I was in school a long time. I've really lost the dream of getting a Ph.D. and doing that after that experience of Georgia. Yeah, I didn't have any-I thought that this job would be cool because I thought I would have all the professor stuff without having to worry about grants and the research program and all the responsibility. It hasn't been quite like that. In a way, because when it gets really, what I've discovered is that 01:38:00when it comes to the students I am them. I am still them. I've been getting jealous when it's like you're going to go have your cool job now where you go get to apply this stuff and make stuff. Oh, that seems nice. I kind of get a little bit of it here. I mean, I enjoy my interactions with the students. I enjoy teaching. It's a lot of work, which will come as no surprise to anybody that teaches. Again, that's something you know theoretically, but viscerally is another thing. I can't imagine just developing a new 10-week course from scratch. You've probably done it. It's crazy to me. I didn't have to do any of that. I've certainly developed some teaching. I like that part of it. I'm glad I never had to do 10 weeks all at once. Then I got involved, then I could-getting back to this idea that I am the student that like is excited about and want to 01:39:00go do stuff. Like, I still like kind of do stuff and that's why I started what is now our cider program, which is hilarious to me. It's even in our brochure, like, Oregon State Cider Program. I'm like, because I said, like yeah I'll teach a week-long cider making course. Now we've done it twice and Elizabeth Thomasino's going to be carrying on our cider program. But I roped a bunch of students into making pear cider, which is also known as perry, and did a little bit of research. Like, for me that's more of what I like. I think what I like about the Food Science Department is that's always been a place where I've been able to do that. The pilot plant, my dad would even say, is like I love the pilot plant. It feels like you can do anything out here. I'm like, I know. Want to make some sausage? No problem.TEM: I feel like that and I don't have any idea what any of the equipment is.
JJ: Yeah.
TEM: I could make anything.
JJ: You can make anything there! Actually, if you talk to Jeff you could go over
there and you totally could make anything over there.TEM: I just like it when he gives me stuff.
JJ: Oh yeah, that's the best.
TEM: Like, here's some pickled green beans. Here's some nitro coffee. It's like, alright.
01:40:00JJ: [Laughs] Totally.
TEM: How did you learn how to teach making cider? When did you get into cider?
JJ: Well, okay, recently since I've been here. My sister really likes cider. My
sister, she doesn't like beer or coffee. Weirdo. But she likes cider. I've always been interested in making something that she would like. I've known about cider, but I can't remember the timeline, but since I've been here, and it's only been just a little over two years, a colleague of mine from Denmark emailed me and informed me that there was a gentleman from the UK, a guy named Peter Mitchell, that has been running these really popular week-long introduction to cider making courses, and that he was trying to make the transition from doing that because he was out in the states like ten weeks a year or something like that, like a really, like a big chunks of time: five weeks out in the East Coast, five weeks out in the West Coast. Without going into all the details, he 01:41:00was looking for like a mechanism to move his classes and I was just like, yeah we can do it. I looked around and I'm like can we do it? I just said yes [laughs]. Turns out, that's a nice think about working at a university, is you kind of do what you-as long as it's within the academic mission, they give you enough rope to hang yourself with. Actually, the Food Science Department they're like really lovely. They're like, sure. Do a cider making course.TEM: Can we make a beer archive? Alright?
JJ: Totally! Sure we need that. So, that's how it started was I thought I was
getting a fully developed course. It turns out it was not a fully developed course. I take it back, I had developed course materials with that class. That's actually, I kind of realized that was a bit more my speed. That course is through the PACE Department and it's sold out twice. The third one's going to be 01:42:00offered this summer and it's already sold out. I've moved it to my, I put things, because I'm leaving because tomorrow's my last day.TEM: We're getting it in just under the wire.
JJ: Yeah. I didn't initially have any specific experience with cider, but I felt
qualified to do it because cider and actually it's probably going to be morphed into an undergraduate lab course aimed at fermentation science students in their first and second year because it's a really nice mix of principles from wine making and principles from brewing. I think it's a really lovely way to teach food science principles and fermentation principles. I was able just to infer a lot of what I know from the wine making side and beer packaging side and was able to teach it, I think decently. Also, I mean I had spent some time learning 01:43:00some of the nuances around it that I didn't know, but it was a pretty easy fit. That's actually, getting back to bring the same full circle, it's, again, like before we started a formal conversation I was like it's going to be pretty easy for me to talk about fermentation because it's like so shaped, even like how I think about myself. I've been doing this stuff for so long. I've been fermenting stuff for 26 years now? I mean, that's more time than the age of most of my students over there in Wiegand. I still like it, you know? I still like fermented apple juice? Okay, cool. I still, it's a, yeah. It's neat that it's still fascinated me. It's why I think, why did I ever think I was going to study viruses? Really trying to do something more important, but I just keep coming back to fermentation and now my new job is I'm director of technical services 01:44:00for Brew Doctor Kombucha, which is a fermented, it's still this fermented thing. It's so cool. That fermentation is really interesting.TEM: Did you, so you've moved to Portland. Are you fully relocated up there?
JJ: Mm-hmm. Yep. That wasn't hard because I was already basically living in
Portland on the weekends. I just have a little place here in Corvallis before I moved, so yeah. I'm at home.TEM: Was your husband up there, like did he live up there?
JJ: Yeah, so, hmm, my domestic situation right now is a little complicated, but
not messy. Yes, my future ex-husband, Donald, who I love, lives in our house there.TEM: In Portland?
JJ: In Portland. I live in a different place in Portland.
TEM: Okay.
JJ: I actually live with my boyfriend in Portland. They all get along that's
fine. We have Thanksgiving together and stuff. It's cool.TEM: Family.
JJ: It's family! Family stuff. Donald's been up there. I've owned that house.
01:45:00I've actually never physically lived in that house, but I've owned that house for 11 years. I'm so glad I bought 11 years ago in Portland, because I wouldn't be able to do that now. That's probably another reason, well, it's a big reason why I'm moving to Corvallis [sic], too, is my life was never really here in Corvallis.TEM: It seems like OSU is a place that you can come back to, too, you know that it's-
JJ: Absolutely.
TEM: That it's not a, you've shown that it doesn't close the door to leave.
JJ: No. Not at all. Also it's my department, too. I mean, I feel way more
connected to it than just because I work there. It's gave me an identity in a lot of ways, gave me my work community. The reason I find my job at Brew Doctor Kombucha was because of my friend, Nate Armbrust, that I went to school with a million years ago who runs the cold brew facility for Stumptown. It was through 01:46:00his connection that, yeah. That's why I tell students make friends now because these are going to be your people forever. That's also the nice thing about being back home in Oregon, too, is because this is where your community and your connections and the people you know are. It's nice.TEM: Yeah. Well, and it's such a small industry. We think that it's a very big
industry but it can often feel like you're one degree separated from people.JJ: Yeah.
TEM: What is something that you thought I would ask you about that I didn't ask?
JJ: Oh, wow.
TEM: Or something that you wanted to...
JJ: I didn't think you were going to get a word in edgewise.
TEM: [Laughs].
JJ: [Laughs] I didn't think you were going to ask any questions. Alright,
Jessica go. Stare at this camera. Okay. Actually I don't know. I hadn't-I was 01:47:00trying not to think about it too much. I've been really busy the last few days, honestly, because I just started this new job. I've been exercising my brain in other ways, but you know. I'm more curious, yeah, to know how this interview will fit into the world of interviews and I feel very like, it's, I feel good that I'm part of that world, even though it's just my little story and I haven't changed the world or anything. But it's nice to like be part of the story.TEM: Yeah. I've interviewed both Tom and Jeff, and I think that both of them
just talk about the department here at OSU in such, I don't know, kind and glowing terms. It seems like it's very obviously it's a lot of hard work, but 01:48:00it's also such an incredible environment for fostering relationships and growth and knowledge.JJ: Absolutely! Yeah, it's, yeah. It's all those things. It's a nice mix of
academics and, well, I would be, jus because people are really interested in learning. Then also you're making stuff. How fun is that? No matter what it is. My sister went through the program. She's not that much younger than me, but she went through the Food Science Program. She graduated in 2011, and she was definitely a Food Science option, like traditional food science. She was into that fermentation stuff like big sister. She didn't like beer. She didn't like any of that. Then she helped get the dairy up to speed and worked with Elizabeth Goddik who's the dairy person and I had to remind Jocelyn [phonetic], that's fermentation, right? Hello! But you know so she even had a similar experience. 01:49:00Came here and like she sent me a Cambert. I was living in like Georgia at the time when she sent it. I was like, that, for me there it was still thing fermentation's like magic. Cambert is like you took something liquid-whatever. It's the mix of learning and academics and being able to apply that to things that make people happy [laughs], like and you sent a Cambert in the mail.TEM: Or some nitro Stumptown.
JJ: Or some, right, so yes. My friend Nate Armbrust, yeah.
TEM: I bet it's very good.
JJ: It is very good.
TEM: [Laughs].
JJ: Totally. I'll get you some more.
TEM: Excellent. Well, thank you very much.
JJ: Yeah, thank you.