I’m Antonella and I come from Italy.
I’m doing my EYE in Berlin, at BrewBaker, an handcrafted brewery.
I’m a professional bartender and my business idea is to start up a brewpub. A brewpub can be defined an artisan brewery including a bar and a small professional kitchen that offer an innovative approach to local cuisine and artisan beer culture.
The elaboration of this project is the result of my years in the hospitality business, my passion for good food and drinks, my social capability and a strong desire to create something unique and satisfying. While my work experience of several years makes me completely comfortable about bar and kitchen management, the artisan beer production was extremely new to me. For this reason, I decided to apply to the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs exchange program! The exchange with the HE allows me to achieve my goals in both the creation of the business model and the business operation. It helps me to deepen my knowledge about craft beer and to get to know a different approach to artisan and high quality beer production.
Before talking about the experience of these first three weeks of work, I would like to spend some words on the city in which I decided to do my exchange. Fortunately, I’ve started my EYE in the best period of the year, summer. It’s rare to find such a huge metropolis that has more than 3milion inhabitants, it’s so green, full of parks, small lakes, river banks and in the same time so full of life. For this reason I decided to buy a bike – what a great choice! Every day I get to work by bike. It takes me around 15 minutes – no traffic stress, no public services – just me and my bike. I’ve never tried something like this!
Anyway, I’ve been working at BrewBaker for almost three weeks now, passing my first brewing experience ever. This first period has been very intense. My knowledge about brewing is growing thanks to my HE, Michael Schwab, and the other guys who work with me, Christian and George. For the first two weeks I have become familiar with the business profile, the team and the professional environment. Furthermore, I’m getting into the logistic profile: bottling, kegging, packaging and distribution. The bottling process is fully handmade and requires a lot of time. You have to be really careful and clean since the artisan beer is really delicate.
Regarding the production process, I’m still far of comprehension but I’m getting familiar with the raw materials and the machinery – an incredibly difficult thing for me in the beginning!
We also participated in the Berlin Beer Week with the stand of our brewery. In this manifestation there were at least 20 stands of artisan breweries from all over the world, which gave me the possibility to taste and talk about different kinds of beer. This was really an incredible experience!
