Sarai Thompson – Staff Writer
With an urgency to find new job opportunities for students, Daytona State College is brewing up a recipe for success with its 30-credit Hospitality Beverage Science certificate program.
In the 28-member Florida College System, the program is exclusive to DSC, although some other colleges offer beer and wine-tasting classes. Costa Magoulas, Dean of the School of Hospitality and Culinary Management, has high hopes for the program. He believes it can jump leaps and bounds over any potential competition and that the program will hurtle students to the top of the industry.
The idea to create a program based on beverage science came about after researching profitability in the hospitality industry and realizing that 40 to 70 percent of profits comes from beverages.
“The reason we made a 10-class college credit certificate is simply because there was no college offering this complete program, even though jobs in this field are in high demand,” Magoulas says.
After obtaining approval from both the board and state, the school was given $1.2 million to fund the program. The laboratory, located in the Mori Hosseini Center in Building 1200 on campus, emulates a sophisticated bar, as well as offers professional equipment needed to brew high quality beer and wine.
“It’s like science class, but with drinks – drinks you aren’t allowed to swallow, but still,” Hayden Warlick, a student majoring in Hospitality, lightheartedly says when asked what he thought about the class.
Another student, Rico Perez, replies with, “I mostly just expected to learn about beverage science. I didn’t expect him to show us how to make it or what we were going to do in it. Like, we tested beer, tried wine and he told us the history of it and he taught us how to make it. I didn’t expect to enjoy the class as much as I did.”
Magoulas explains, “We wanted the program to be exactly like the culinary or hospitality program – they’re all hands on. So that when people go to school here, they can go directly from our program into the industry and be trained to use their equipment.”
Magoulas, who oversees beverage sciences, adds that the end goal is for students to be able to leave the program and go to any “gastro pub,” or any restaurant with a full beverage station, and be able to run it.
Such a program is especially fitting in Volusia County because the city of Daytona Beach is the number one employer in hospitality, with 41,000 jobs. Although they can’t yet drink themselves, the minimum age to enroll in the program is 18 years old. A waiver must be completed and signed if students are under the legal age of 21 years old.
But Magoulas emphasizes, the Beverage Science program is not a brewery, it is a classroom. Classes teach the history of beers and wines from around the world, while letting students sample the beverages being created by tasting and spitting out the product. Better known as “expectorating,” students will follow wine and beer-tasting protocol by swirling the liquid in a glass, taking a sniff, sipping it, swishing it in their mouths and then spitting it out.
Whether a student or a connoisseur of fine beverages, this makes more sense than getting drunk in class, which some students might prefer. But that would not be a professional approach to the program. Experts say there is a whole art to the process of tasting beer and wine and students will be learning about that too.
Eventually, their palates will become refined enough to successfully pair certain beverages with the appropriate foods. Students also will know how the products are created and how to make them, as well as storing, sanitizing, purchasing and managing products.