BOURBON PRODUCTION ENGINEERING: TEACHING CHEMICAL ENGINEERING CONCEPTS THROUGH A COURSE ON AMERICA’S NATIVE SPIRIT

The bourbon production process is an engaging platform that has facilitated the delivery of a broad spectrum of chemical engineering fundamentals to over 100 students from a diversity of backgrounds and stages of life. While courses have been developed on beer brewing ^[24] and culinary science ^[25] for engineering students, few courses have focused on using these popular topics (e.g., bourbon, coffee) to introduce chemical engineering to those outside of the field. We encourage faculty to consider how they can use these popular topics as an outreach opportunity to introduce chemical engineering concepts to students from a wider variety of educational backgrounds. These courses provide an opportunity to not only expand the knowledge of students on topics of interest, but also facilitate the spread of chemical engineering concepts beyond the chemical engineering classroom. With the UC Davis course on coffee production, which is offered to first-year students, this has been shown to impact students’ decisions to enroll in STEM majors.^[12] While the bourbon production course is typically taken by students in their junior or senior year (or beyond college), it can help to expand the public knowledge of the field of chemical engineering and how chemical engineers contribute to the production of not only high value but also highly popular commercial products. Further, concepts from this course have been integrated into a distillery operator training program, allowing employees with significant knowledge of the operations of distillery equipment to learn about some of the fundamentals that drive distillery performance. Together, these courses have the potential to impact distillery operations and efficiency. Further, they contribute to the public perception of how chemical engineers contribute to society beyond the traditional fields of oil, gas, and high value chemical commodities.