Hops in the Hills craft beer fest gets a boost from MC student brewers

June 17, 2022

They’re currently stored in the cool confines of Dr. Nathan Duncan’s basement, but on Saturday, June 25, eight brews created by Maryville College students will be available for sampling by roughly 1,000 attendees of a craft beer festival.

The annual event, known as Hops in the Hills and held in downtown Maryville, is part of the City of Maryville’s annual Summer on Broadway extravaganza and will include over two dozen professional breweries — along with sample pours from Duncan’s “EXP200: Introduction to Brewing” course that the professor of chemistry launched in 2018.

“For this, we have about eight different beers we’re bringing, and almost all of them are student recipes,” said Duncan, who took the beer home with him during recent summer renovations to the College’s Sutton Science Center. “Two are my recipes, including the Irish red ale we brewed earlier this year for the Choir of Man show at the Clayton Center, and I brewed my brown ale this year for it as well. Those are the only two that aren’t student recipes.

“The rest are all from this class except for one, and it’s from an alumnus who took the class in 2020. In addition to students from this year’s class that are working as volunteers for Hops in the Hills, I have students that go back to the very first time we offered it in 2018 who are coming this year as well. A lot of Maryville College alumni will make up the volunteers for this event, and I’m really excited from the standpoint that a lot of them took the class before it was even a part of Hops in the Hills.

Old Fashioned logo
Becca Roberson ’22 has designed a label for her Old Fashioned bourbon stout, which will be offered part of the Hops in the Hills craft beer festival.

“To see how much this little class has grown as far as really becoming a part of our regional craft brew scene is exciting,” he added.

Duncan offers the course every spring and has room for roughly 20 to 24 students. It’s an upper-level class for students 21 and older that focuses on the brewing process, and because beer can be fermented under pressure and turned around in as little as two weeks depending on the style, there’s ample opportunity to try various creations and concoctions.

And some of them, he added, succeed beyond anyone’s expectations, including his own.

“The beer I’m most excited about is one that was created by Becca Roberson ’22 that’s supposed to be a beer that has all of the components or nuances of an Old Fashioned cocktail,” he said. “It’s a porter-style beer that’s aged with some oak, some bourbon, some cherry and also with some orange peel. It’s one she made early in the semester, and it tasted really good. Now that it’s been aging for a while, it should be even better. As soon as we tried it, I told everyone, ‘We’re saving this for Hops in the Hills.’”

In addition to Roberson’s creation — for which she’s designed its own logo — and Duncan’s ales, some of the other brewing class offerings for Hops in the Hills include an imperial stout and for those who find the overly hoppy flavor of stouts and ales off-putting, there’s the brew by alum Sawyer Cradit ’20: a “margarita beer,” according to Duncan.

“It’s kind of a sour wheat style, very low on the hops,” Duncan said. “With this, he was making a beer that used sour mash barley, a lot of wheat to give it kind of the haziness and a little bit of sweetness, and the hops that he used were a New Zealand variety that adds kind of a lime flavor to it.”

Hops in the Hills, Duncan added, is the latest in a busy schedule of events for which his students have brewed beer. (Because their brews are not sold, and the class operates as a homebrewing club, they’re not required to obtain a license to serve it.) In addition to the Blount County Alumni Association’s annual spring barbecue and the aforementioned Choir of Man performance, MC beer was recently served at the banquet celebrating the end of KT Days, and Duncan addressed the assembled alumni about the course, and its plans for the future.

“We have some things in the works that we hope will formalize this class, meaning that it will eventually be replaced with a four-hour class,” he said. “What we’re doing now would be considered the lab part of the class, while it will also include a lot more deep-dive lectures, and we’ve talked with several folks in the brewing industry in our region who are interested in partnering with us for on-site and external internships.”

Maryville College is a nationally-ranked institution of higher learning and one of America’s oldest colleges. For more than 200 years we’ve educated students to be giving citizens and gifted leaders, to study everything, so that they are prepared for anything — to address any problem, engage with any audience and launch successful careers right away. Located in Maryville, Tennessee, between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the city of Knoxville, Maryville College offers nearly 1,200  students from around the world both the beauty of a rural setting and the advantages of an urban center, as well as more than 60 majors, seven pre-professional programs and career preparation from their first day on campus to their last. Today, our 10,000 alumni are living life strong of mind and brave of heart and are prepared, in the words of our Presbyterian founder, to “do good on the largest possible scale.”