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Job Swap: Walter Makaula As A Master Beer Brewer

MIAMI ( CBSMiami) – Most people have to wait until the weekend to crack open a few cans of their favorite beer, but how fun would it be to be surrounded by beer all day long?

Milton Montanez works as a master beer brewer at Miami Brewing Company in Homestead.

Bottled up with excitement, CBS4's Walter Makaula swapped jobs with Montanez this week.

He wasted no time to put on his new uniform and hair net and got straight to work.

Making beer at the brewing company starts with extracting sugar from the barley. Hopps are then thrown in for bitterness. After that, it's cooled in large tanks where yeast is added to eat up all the sugar. Alcohol and CO2 are added next and then the beer sits for a week to ferment. After the yeast, hopps, and impurities are filtered, carbonation is added to what's left.

Makaula filled 10-thousand cans. Throughout the process, he learned that aluminum cans are best for beer, the beer drinker, and the environment.

Light is apparently beer's biggest enemy. It'll turn beer bad, which is why you'll never see beer in clear bottles.

Cans are also 100 percent recyclable, and they're safer in dark nightclubs and at the pool, unlike glass bottles that can break and cut someone.

The cans go down the conveyor belt, and are sanitized before entering the filling machine. That's where the important quality control measure of "taste testing" occurs.

"Yeah, that's my work," said Montanez.

"The only thing that was missing was a big screen TV and my buddies," said Makaula.

The next spot along the assembly line was to visually check the cans to make sure they're filled to the right level. If not, they had to be quickly pulled off the line and dumped.

The cans come out of the next machine sealed. They're then cleaned and head over for packing.

Before they leave the building, they get one last weigh in on a scale. If they don't measure up, they're pulled off and discarded.

The cans are snapped into easy to carry six pack holders, and loaded onto palettes before being shipped out.

If you feel like you have a cool job, and you want try a job swap, please send an email to Walter at jobswap@cbs.com.

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