In this episode of “5-Minute Mentor,” I sit down with Jamie Floyd, founding brewer and co-owner of Ninkasi Brewing Company of Eugene, Ore. Floyd graciously offers some insightful tips for homebrewers on nailing down your process before making big expenditures, and using flaked ingredients in beer.

Known mostly for its Total Domination IPA and Tricerahops Double IPA, Ninkasi has been producing beer since June 2006. Floyd, however, began fermenting during his high school years in the San Francisco Bay Area—storing mixtures of Tree Top Apple Juice and Fleischmann’s Yeast in a friend’s 130-degree attic to create a beverage that he says “tasted like an apple biscuit gone wrong.”

A few years later in 1990, he started homebrewing (beer, this time) while studying sociology at the University of Oregon. He remembers exploring the sensory aspects of beer, beer history and beer styles in those early days: “Being a sociology major, [I find that] it’s the relationship of beer and man more than the science of beer that fascinates me.” It was only after he graduated and accepted a job at Steelhead Brewing Company’s brewpub that he considered brewing for a living.

“I wanted to be an educator or own my own business,” Floyd says. “By owning a brewery I get to do both. And really also fulfill my sociology background or degree of being able to be the village brewer and being community-oriented and providing a service for my community that takes resources to create a greater good.”

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