Words and photos by Ashley Joanna
Edited by Breandán Kearney
Humans of Belgian Beer is a series of photographic portraits which celebrate a people and their culture.
One vivid memory Cristal Peck has of her childhood in Australia is sticking her face into a mug filled with homemade lager to see how many foam bubbles she could cover her face with.
She hated the taste, but wanted to be a part of her parents’ kitchen sink science experiment.
When she was a little older, her parent’s homebrew hobby showed her that beer was about living organisms and their vital processes. Cristal came to see beer as a celebration of biology. Years later, she completed a Master’s Degree in Biomedical Science. Her main goal in life became finding a way to combine her two passions: biology and beer.
In the summer of 2013, Cristal flew across the world from Melbourne, Australia to Berlin, Germany. She had no job lined up and very little money; only a dream to become a professional brewer in Europe. “Moving to Berlin with no plan was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done,” says Cristal. “But something inside of me had always been drawn to living abroad, so I thought it was now or never.”
Cristal’s life in Germany did not turn out how she thought it might. She was living paycheck to paycheck, struggling with a new language, and getting turned down at every brewery she applied to. To make ends meet, she settled for working at a lab micro-injecting fruit fly embryos to explore the development of the nervous system. It felt like a big step back. When Cristal left Melbourne, she had sworn to herself that she would never work full-time in a science lab again if it didn’t involve brewing.
Determined to break into the beer industry, Cristal wrote articles for the Berlin based magazine Beer, Bars, and Brewers. Her regular online column, called News from the Mash Tun, was about happenings in the brewing industry, from brewery acquisitions and statistics on global beer consumption to quirky anecdotes. It was varied and fun, but finding work in the industry was proving difficult. At one point, she secured a job in a beer shop, but it later closed down and Cristal was back where she started.
Then in 2017, the owner of Berliner Berg Brewery read an article she had written and offered her a job as a brewer. The role allowed her to study mixed culture fermentation with a microscope while also barrel ageing beers and working with different berries to produce a new fruit Weisse beer release every month. Two years later, she was promoted to the role of Head Brewer. “The biology of brewing beer is something that has resonated with me for a long time,” she says. “The fact that you take this long, starch molecule, and you chop it up, and yeast metabolizes it: this was always a very interesting and fascinating concept to me.”
Cristal’s work did not go unnoticed by others in the industry. She was a biomedical graduate with valuable experience in both a lab environment and in a working brewhouse. In the summer of 2019, she received an email from a recruiter in Belgium who was working on behalf of the malting company, Boortmalt.
It was an offer she simply could not turn down. In 2019, Cristal left Germany and moved to Antwerp in Belgium. As Head Brewmaster and Malt Specialist at Boortmalt, Cristal is now able to combine both of her passions in one project. Boortmalt is the world’s leading malting company, supplying barley malt to brewers, distillers, and food industries through their 27 malting plants around the world and their 3 million tonnes production capacity.
“My boss always muses that the malting industry is not ‘sexy’ in the way that the brewing industry is perceived as being,” says Cristal. “I think she’s correct; very few people understand the amazing things that go on in a malt house… which is a shame, because malting is an incredibly complex and natural science and art. It’s the beginning of the journey from barley to beer. It really is sexy.”
Not only does Cristal brew and carry out lab tests on different malts and yeast viability, but she’s also leading a malt innovation project for Boortmalt’s daughter company, Belgomalt. As part of their Creative Series, she produced a Winter Infusion malt, a barley malt with an infusion of spices such as cinnamon, star anise, clove, and orange peel intended to take Belgian winter ales to a different level.
She’s now preparing to release a Summer Infusion, inspired by lavender fields and Spanish orange tree yards. Belgomalt claims it’s a malt with a delicate floral lavender note coupled with a refreshing, bright, citrus character.
Now making important new contributions to Belgian beer, Cristal says she’s grateful to those at Berliner Berg who gave her a start, and to Boortmalt for trusting her with her current opportunity. She’s also grateful to her parents for their kitchen sink homebrew experiments back in Melbourne. They showed her how foam bubbles on a lager could be a celebration of biology.
Malting is an incredibly complex and natural science and art. It’s the beginning of the journey from barley to beer.
Cristal Peck
