Like lots of college students, Amanda Koeller poured beers to pay her way through school. The then 20-something Koeller, studying hotel administration at UNLV, soon developed a genuine curiosity about how suds got made. “I started thinking to myself, ‘What does it take to be a brewmaster?’” says Koeller, who began taking courses toward a Master Brewers Certificate program at UC Davis. She recalls that among 40 students in her class, she was one of just nine women.
After completing her education in 2015, Koeller interned at Henderson’s Bad Beat Brewing before spending six years at Las Vegas’ Big Dog’s Brewing Company, ascending to the lead brewer position. Bad Beat then brought her back to fill its head brewing position in August 2021.
Now, Koeller—the region’s only female head brewer, according to the Nevada Craft Brewers Association—is launching her next chapter: As of March 13, she’ll officially be the head brewer at Las Vegas Brewing Company in the northwest Valley.
What do you enjoy most about beer? Really, the social aspect of it—everybody being able to get together, sit down and have a beverage, and the people that you meet in the community. Also, there’s so many different styles. There’s beer that’s great for warm weather in the summertime. You can get together out at the pool and have a beverage. And the same for the wintertime, when you have your winter warmers.
Same question, but about brewing. There are moments, and it happens almost every single week, where I’ll just be in the brewery, sitting back and thinking, “I can’t believe I’m taking barley that has been malted, and I can create recipes and put them together, and in a couple of weeks, I have beer.” … And the people that I have met in the brewing industry, the brewers that I’ve worked with, it’s such a great community and we’re all really close.
How do you come up with new craft beers? We do some fun and crazy stuff, but I’m a purist when it comes to styles. I like to brew historic styles and make them true to form. We have an English-style brown ale coming out, so I’ll look at the style guidelines. Then that’s when I start to put what we call a grain bill together. Different malts are created by different roasting techniques and different drying techniques. So I’ll create a recipe from maybe six different malts in my English brown ale.
Then I start to think about the brewing process: Do I want my brown ale to be a little bit on the sweeter side? The answer is yes for that style. Then it goes into the actual brewing process of the mash. The temperature of my mash will make my beer either dry or on the sweeter side. And then I have to think about the yeast: What yeast strain do I want to create [with the] typical characteristics of an English-style brown ale.
And then hops. There’s a variety of English hops, so as a brewer, I decide which English hops to use. How much am I going to add in the boil? All of those things come together, and in a couple of weeks, I have this product that I really want people to drink and go, “Wow, that’s a really good English brown ale.”
You describe this as a creative process, but it’s also clearly science. Do you think of it that way? When I went to UC Davis it was less work in a brewery than classroom work. I mean, you’re talking about chemical compounds of hops, bio transformations that happen in the boil, health of the yeast and different bacterial contaminations. We even went into the growing of hops and different fungal infections that hops can be prone to seeing little insect infestations. So the program at UC Davis is basically a science base.
Why did you decide to move over to Las Vegas Brewing Company? They’ve only been open for about nine months, so I really want to work with them to create a brand and help them grow. They’ll grow, and I’ll grow.
What does it mean to you to be Nevada’s only female head brewer at the moment? I’m happy that I’m able to do this. I would just like more women to be in the same position. … My goal is to bring awareness to women that this is an industry they can thrive in. One of the brewers that I’ve had with me at Bad Beat, Becca [Halpin], is phenomenal. She started out as my assistant brewer, and she really was the best assistant brewer I’ve ever had. She learned so fast, so I bumped her up to brewer pretty fast, and she’s been excellent.
I think the exposure of her, myself and other women in the brewing industry is really showing more women that it can be accessible.
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