Drinking wine can feel like a small ceremony: inspect the colour and clarity, give it a swirl, sniff for fruit, flowers, oak, or whatever else your nose picks up, then finally take a sip and launch into a spiel about body, finish, and complexity.
When it comes to appreciating beer, however, Vagisa Rama, lead brewer at People People Brewing Co., has just one rule: enjoy it.
And there’s certainly plenty to enjoy at the sprawling bar in Sentosa’s WEAVE, where Mr Rama and his team oversee every pint, bottle, and can from grain to pour.
Rather than being brewed elsewhere, packed into kegs, and transported to the venue, the beer is made on-site in a 2,000 sq ft production space equipped with full-scale tanks and everything needed for brewing, before flowing into the tanks above the bar, through the taps, and finally into your glass.
Before he was overseeing fermenters and beer taps, the 30-year-old Singaporean was working in a very different field.
He majored in Chemical Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and also holds three diplomas — two from Nanyang Polytechnic and one from Singapore Polytechnic — in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Technology, Energy and Environmental Management in the Process Industry, and Advanced Chemical Engineering.
With a CV like that, it’s no surprise that Mr Rama was introduced to MS News as something of a “genius”, though he is far more modest about it, insisting that he was only an “average” student whose grades were “all right”.
Still, his qualifications eventually led him to Shell, where he began his career in process operations in the oil and gas industry.
Instead of making beer, he spent his days working with a very different set of tanks, operating equipment, troubleshooting issues, and keeping complex systems running smoothly.
Mr Rama’s route into brewing began on one of his midweek rest days.
As a shift worker, his days off sometimes fell on Tuesdays, when most of his friends were at work and the bars were blissfully empty (with happy-hour prices to match).
During one such visit, his engineering brain kicked into gear as he stared at his pint and wondered how it had been made.
So he did what any curious millennial would do: he Googled it.
His search revealed that beer did not actually require a mysterious full-fledged laboratory or a long list of complicated secret ingredients.
“With a typical beer, it’s just malt, hops, yeast, and water,” he told MS News. All simple enough for him to begin experimenting with at home.
Soon, his parents’ kitchen had become a miniature brewery.
Armed with pots, pans, and online tutorials, Mr Rama made his first five-litre batch over the stove, then waited four weeks for it to ferment and condition with no guarantee that it would be drinkable.
When he finally opened a bottle with his family, everyone was pleasantly surprised.
“We had no idea how it was actually going to taste, but it tasted decent,” he recalled. “Everyone was like, ‘This actually tastes like real beer!'”
That modest success was enough to send him down what he called the “rabbit hole” of homebrewing.
There were, naturally, less successful attempts as well, with “lots of exploding bottles and beers that just had to go straight down the toilet”, Mr Rama described with a laugh.
The occasional disaster did little to dampen his enthusiasm. “I loved the idea of making beer and giving it all to my friends and family so we could have a good time.”
While most people probably wouldn’t look at a chemical engineering graduate and think, “Hey, he’d probably know how to make a good beer”, Mr Rama sees a clear line connecting both worlds.
“There are actually a lot of overlapping aspects between chemical engineering and brewing,” he shared. “You work with the exact same equipment, such as pumps, compressors, and heat exchangers. It’s almost all the same things, just applied to a different avenue.”
Both fields also demand the same eye for operations: understanding how equipment works, spotting what has gone wrong, and keeping complex systems running smoothly.
The liquid may be different, but the precision, troubleshooting, and process control remain much the same.
So, after about five years in oil and gas, Mr Rama took the leap into production brewing at Archipelago Brewery under Asia Pacific Breweries, where he worked across brewing, quality control, and equipment operations.
He later helped set up a brewery in Jakarta, overseeing equipment installation, training brewers, and developing SOPs.
“That was my first proper experience setting up a brewery from scratch,” he said. “There were so many things to learn technically that I could actually apply here.”
Good timing was on his side. When Mr Rama returned to Singapore, People People Brewing Co., part of the Burnt Ends Hospitality Group, was being built.
He joined during the setup phase and now works with an assistant brewer to oversee the entire process, from grain entering the brewhouse to beer flowing from the taps. Or, as he put it, “from grain to glass”.
There’s an obvious perk to brewing beer for a living, and Mr Rama admits people often assume he drinks a lot.
“That’s probably true as well,” he joked. “It’s part of the job.”
But the idea that brewers simply turn up, get tipsy, and call it a day could not be further from reality.
The job involves engineering, microbiology, chemistry, physics, and plenty of maths, from managing yeast and fermentation to calculating the exact amount of malt, hops, and cleaning chemicals needed.
Even playful ideas, such as a green or pandan-flavoured beer, are carefully reverse-engineered to achieve the right sweetness, maltiness, and bitterness.
For Mr Rama, however, a good beer isn’t just one that tastes nice, but one that tastes the same every time.
“Taste is very subjective, but I would say consistency is the most important aspect. That’s what every brewer tries to achieve,” he said.
Having the brewery on-site helps preserve that consistency, as the beer flows straight into the tanks above the bar instead of “going out into the world” and being affected by storage conditions.
The irony is that knowing so much about beer has made it harder for him to enjoy one without analysing how it was made. An “occupational hazard”, as he called it.
Still, his favourite part of the job is simple: seeing someone enjoy what he brewed.
“The work inside the brewery can get very hectic and draining,” he said.
But when you see someone drinking your beer and enjoying it, that’s a pretty good feeling.
For all the overlap between chemical engineering and brewing, walking away from a secure career in oil and gas was understandably not an obvious choice.
Mr Rama was in his “early-to-mid 20s” when he made the switch. What’s more, oil and gas came with the sort of salary and benefits that made relatives nod approvingly, while professional brewing was a path few people around him fully understood.
His family remained supportive, though it took them some time to grasp why he would leave an established industry for beer.
Mr Rama, meanwhile, chose not to overthink it. “I just decided I was going to wing it and do what I really wanted to do,” he shrugged.
For now, he has no plans to return to a conventional engineering role. “I see myself staying in brewing forever, if that’s possible. I love it. It came out as a passion, and it’s still there.”
Asked what advice he would give someone contemplating a less conventional career, Mr Rama first insisted that he was hardly qualified to dispense life lessons.
He eventually settled on a simple answer: follow where your passion takes you. “And it’s even better,” he added. “If you can make money out of it.”
To learn more about People People Brewing Co., its beers, and upcoming events including brewery tours, visit its official website. And here’s how to get there:
People People Brewing Co.
Address: 26 Sentosa Gateway, Unit Nos #B1-209 to #B1-217, Singapore 098138
Opening hours: 11.30am to 11pm daily (closed on Tuesdays)
Also read: NUS engineering grad left DBS to start Matchaya, now supplies 50% of matcha used by S’pore cafes
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Featured image by MS News.