Beer & Brewing

Iron Brew is one of those UC Davis traditions that sounds almost too good to be real. Every winter, students in FST 102B Practical Malting and Brewing spend weeks formulating recipes, brewing batches on nanobreweries in the RMI pilot brewery, and competing for the chance to have their beer produced commercially. 

Past winners, including Off the Clock, Caledonian Nights, Mighty Gale Ale, and Brew La-La have gone from campus fermentors to taps at The Gunrock, Sudwerk Brewing Co., and now Dunloe Brewing . 

What happens to your favorite wine or beer when the climate that shaped it starts to change?

That question was at the heart of Sips of Change, a dynamic panel at Terra Madre Americas, where UC Davis scientists and an Argentine winemaker came together to talk adaptation, tradition, and what fermented beverages might look like in the decades ahead.

It seems like we just began 2025, and yet here we are entering winter while looking back at a year full of memories.

On a crisp autumn morning in Davis, the scent of malt and hops drifted through the Anheuser-Busch InBev Pilot Brewery. Among the gleaming stainless steel, for the first time, all three UC Davis brewing professors stood side by side in the new brewery to celebrate a program that has shaped the modern beer world. 

Walk into any brewery and you'll find that after brewing beer massive amounts of "spent grain" are leftover. Every year, America's 9,000 breweries produce roughly 20 billion pounds of spent grain, enough to fill a football stadium several times over. 

The food science and technology major offered at UC Davis is a well-rounded mix of theory and practice, with a hands-on learning approach being both effective and expected at California’s No. 1 agricultural school.  This program is internationally recognized and is one of only 88 IFT HERB approved programs , but how did this niche major come to be?

UC Davis is gearing up for the end of the quarter, and our final Savor for the academic year is next week.

From UC Davis News and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Crafting beer is a precise science. Brewers know that various types of yeast and different fermentation methods control how beer will taste. But a phenomenon known as “hop creep” can sometimes throw a brewer for a loop.