Category: Services

LO3-Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.

Investigation and Preparation: 

As we have spent a half year getting to know the service, getting used to how it works and the routines for brewing various drinks by following our supervisors, we came across the opportunity to finally try things out by ourselves. With new grade 9-10’s coming into the service, there was a perfect opportunity for us grade 11’s to teach the newcomers and get them integrated into our service. As a result, our goal was to be able to lead and help these newcomers become accustomed to the service but also develop our leadership and brewing skills through organizing our own recipes for us and the grade 9-10’s to try. We spent a couple of lessons planning what we might do every session, thinking about what would be best chronological to get the grade 9-10’s more comfortable with brewing and also what might be fun making. The general outline of our plan revolved around our earlier sessions to be easy and well-known drinks that everyone likes, such as like ice-lemon tea. We would then go on to develop into more interesting and complex drinks, such as carbonated drinks which require a new skill to create. Finally, we wanted the students to plan and make their own recipe, making it into a competition so it becomes competitive and so that we could extract the best recipe out of it. We made sure to split the roles evenly amongst us grade 11’s. We would generally have two mainly supervising each session and alternate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LO2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

LO7-Recognise and consider the ethics implications of choices and actions.

Action, Reflection and Demonstration: 

With the schedule done, we ended up implementing our session plan, which was about 8+ weeks long. We followed our plan, and allowed for turns in supervision for each session. Oftentimes, we would just join in and help the grade 9-10’s use some of the equipment, namely this particular chemical which I completely forgot what it was called that was used for washing any of the utensils used. At first, the things we did were all going according to the plan but we did run across some mistakes along the way. One of the biggest failures we came across as leaders of the session was forgetting to submit properly the ingredients form the previous week or because of some miscommunication, ingredients don’t arrive even when ordered. This, unfortunately, occurred about two or more times which made us walk into a session without any of the ingredients. This forced us to adapt to either create a drink with the ingredients we already have – which were often just simple drinks – or allocate time for all of us to research new recipes. We always had something to do in this service so that was definitely a nice thing. However, one of the biggest regrets was not being able to participate in any big event in our school to share some of the awesome recipes we have found and created in our time in the service. This is obviously due to COVID-19 restrictions but we were definitely the unlucky batch of students as our seniors did get the chance to do so. That being said, looking back, I think we adapted well to the restriction as we set more focus on developing and researching new recipes so that our future members of the service can use them in future events when restrictions die down.

 

LO 3. Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

After spending seasons 1 and 2, with enough experience, our grade 11’s were given a chance to plan out 4-5 weeks’ worth of lessons. Although we were kind of like seniors in our service as grade 11’s, we were all quite inexperienced with how Sustainabrew worked as a service and as well as not being familiar with the concept of brewing sustainable drinks. We have helped our service as assistants through seasons 1 and 2 but this time, it was rather our first time given “official” responsibility in the service.

Knowing as new students were joining this season, it was important to consider how we felt as students first entering this service. Our plan started off by creating something simple yet tasty and so we planned the first couple of sessions with simple drinks like lemonade and lemon tea. As we let our new members get used to the environment and our small sustainable community, we started looking at things that we created in the past that were successful. We eventually even made the infamous Kombucha, a drink that our previous experiences didn’t light great positive experiences with; the scoby was something we all found disgusting. However, the teachers seemed to like it and thus was marked as a success. As we created more and more drinks, familiar with more recipes, we dedicated some of our days to understanding sustainability and how we can create sustainable drinks. We had people make presentations and present recipes that might be of future use.

It was great to see how the plans that we made came out to be quite organized and smooth. However, I think we grade 11’s realized, sometimes it is quite hard to make each and every lesson interesting and unique. As a strategy to overcome this, whenever we ran out of ideas, we liked to take previous recipes and create a twist in them. That way, we were able to branch out to not only new recipes but create a personalized more unique drink. I think this also helped the members in sustainabrew to become more creative and explorative in our ideas.

Here is the picture of the scoby. Not so pleasant for most of us…

 

 

LO4 Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

So far in our service, I was able to partake in making a variety of drinks. These drinks usually tend to be simplistic as fewer ingredients do help with the sustainability aspect. However, the main reason is usually that we are all novices when it comes to brewing drinks. We have made drinks ranging from the nice and easy to make lemon tea to things that were more explorative like the pineapple virgin mojito. Usually, these explorative types of drinks are very new to me and thus I do learn a lot on the way. One particular experience I wanted to record for this reflection is when we made a kombucha

So what is a “kombucha”?

That was one of the first questions I definitely had. To put it simply, it is a fermented tea where you allow a living bacteria to technically “brew” and produce acid to bring taste to the tea. The bacteria has to be fed some form of energy, which is done through us pouring sugar into the tea. This drink is actually perfect for our sustainable goal as all you technically need is just the bacteria, tea and sugar. This bacteria we use is called a “SCOBY” and it can be reused over and over again as long as it doesn’t die; obviously. We even added some strawberries to sweeten the drink.

One of the memorable experiences when making the kombucha was definitely how disgusting the Scoby looked. To put it frankly, I would never dare to drink something that had a visually disturbing bacteria living inside in it for a week( it takes a week for it to ferment). It was definitely a very interesting experience and I also kind of pushed myself to touch the scoby; which to this day I still don’t understand why.

LO 3. Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

LO 6. Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.

The service that I decided to participate this year is Sustainabrew. This service was rather intriguing and appealing overall as it felt somewhat different/unique from the other service out there when I reading the description. The description involved the process of brewing drinks in a sustainable manner which was almost too perfect for me as I love drinks in general – honestly who doesn’t? I also really liked the overall concept of the service, where we find ways to make sustainable drinks and provide it to our school whilst also receiving some funds in return in which we could use to donate any organisation. It’s really just 3 birds in one stone and the effectiveness of the service just seemed very practical: good drinks will sell out really well which can be used for the greater cause. But, moreover, I was interested in the idea of sustainable brewing and I kind of had hoped for creating our own sources of ingredients through our private garden or even the hydroponics in our science department (at the time I didn’t know it existed). And to my luck, we had options in using either of the facilities.

The fact that we can make drinks through resources in our own school is going to be a huge contribution/part of how “sustainable” we want to be. As much as we all love drinks, the point of the service is kind of lost if we were to just mass order ingredients, with ignorance of where it came from, to just create tasty drinks. We needed to consider carbon footprint, the process/journey of the ingredients (where it came from), organic or inorganic etc. This is overall because we want to limit potentially the support of “exploited” labour, underpaid labour, non-environmentally friendly emissions etc  As aforementioned, this can be limited through just thinking about our choices as consumers when thinking of ingredients for drinks.  So far, one of the drinks we brewed is the kombucha. This drink is heavily sustainable in the aspect of it being a fermented drink(natural), the ferment can be used repeatedly, limited ingredients required as well as the fact that the drink is healthy and provides health benefits such as strengthening your immune system.

Overall, I enjoyed the couple of weeks of Sustainabrew, it was honestly exactly what I pictured in mind.