MC beer brewing course provides libations for Clayton Center’s Choir of Man performance
It’s a show so interactive that beer will be distributed from the stage to guests in the audience on Saturday night at the Clayton Center for the Arts on the Maryville College campus — and it’s been brewed literally across the street.
The Choir of Man is an 80-minute dance and music extravaganza set in an intimate pub, and as part of the pre-show festivities, cast members pour beer from an on-stage keg and pass them around to audience members 21 and older who want a pint. It’s a way of warming up the crowd and setting the scene for an evening of folk, rock, show tunes and pub chanties, all performed around a loose story of nine friends gathered together in their favorite bar.
“When you walk in for a normal show, you’re asked to turn off your phone and be very quiet, but we want it to feel like the audience is walking into the bar for the first time to meet their mates,” cast member Mark Irwin said. “There are instruments hanging up everywhere, and we’ll play along to Irish music in the background, and we pass out real beer to the audience. Every show is sponsored by a different brewery.”
For the Clayton Center for the Arts performance, that “brewery” is “EXP 200: Introduction to Brewing,” a course taught by Dr. Nathan Duncan, associate professor of chemistry at Maryville College. When Clayton Center Events Coordinator Hudson Perrine was asked to procure the libations for the Choir of Man show, she looked no further than Duncan’s class in the Sutton Science Center, located across the street from the Clayton Center on the Maryville College campus.
“We had brewed beer for the alumni barbecue in the fall during Homecoming, and we brewed beer for President (Bryan) Coker’s Christmas party with the faculty and staff in December,” Duncan said. “We’re scheduled to brew some for the Blount County Alumni Association’s April event on campus, and for the Hops in the Hills beer festival in Maryville this summer.
“We’re not a brewery, and we don’t have a license to sell alcohol, but we can produce it for places and events that are giving it away.”
Because of the fermentation vessels used in the course — an upper-level class for students 21 and older that focuses on the brewing process — beer can be fermented under pressure and turned around in as little as two weeks, depending on the particular style, Duncan added. For the Choir of Man show, organizers suggested an Irish red ale.
“We very quickly came up with a pretty standard Irish red ale recipe, and that’s what we made,” he said. “I’ve been brewing for close to 20 years now, so I have a lot of experience under my belt, and I’ve helped a lot of other people get into the hobby. When I decided to start teaching this course, I had a pretty good idea for how to get students involved in a way that would make them want to brew more than one time.”
And the dividends are so much more than just pints that are pleasing to the palate: There’s talk of expanding the course, along with “CHM149: Chemistry of Beer”— which focuses on the science of brewing and beer’s connections to society and history — into additional brewing related curricula, Duncan said.
And it doesn’t hurt that the students have found ways to infuse their creations with unique traits, he added.
“Last fall, we brewed a Scottish ale that ended up coming out really good, because they put their own twist on it,” he said. “It was a little bit smoky, which is kind of unique for that style of beer, so I was pretty happy with that.
“Certainly, we haven’t had every recipe turn out to be an award winner, but we start out brewing some really safe options and go from there to sort of figure out what they want to make, and to play around with things that will help them develop something unique and different.”
The Choir of Man performance takes place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 12, in the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre of the Clayton Center for the Arts. Tickets range from $40.50 to $61.50.