For Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory chemical engineer Jeremy Feaster, chemistry isn’t just a career path, it’s a conduit for serving others. Whether it’s through his own foundation for underrepresented minority students, his leadership role with the Lab’s African American Body of Laboratory Employees (ABLE) or his love for cooking and winemaking, service has always been at his core of his being.
“It’s why I do the things that I do,” Feaster said. “In a lot of ways, [science] is an expression of creativity. I refer to myself as a ‘chemistry creative’ — I’m very much a creative person that just happens to do chemistry and chemical engineering.”
Born premature and legally blind from a pair of birth defects, Feaster said his drive to help others stems from his gratitude for the miracle of having his vision today, which he credits to the power of prayer and his parents finding the right doctors and medical procedures. His childhood experience served as an anchor for his religious faith and a catalyst for giving back to his community.
“I’m blessed, so why shouldn’t I try to do as much as I can, for as long as I can, to make a positive impact on other people’s lives?” Feaster said. “Because so much has been given to me, it allows me to give freely and to want to be able to help so many others.”
Growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, Feaster also saw the devastating impact that racial inequalities and a lack of educational and job opportunities had on his peers, and on Black Americans in general. His first exposure to chemistry came in high school, when he got a summer job washing dishes in a chemistry lab at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. There, a professor allowed Feaster to try some experiments in chemical synthesis, which became his first research project. That happenstance eventually led Feaster to blend chemistry with service through tutoring, teaching and providing scholarships and mentoring opportunities for Black and underrepresented students.
In 2012, Feaster founded the Jeremy T. Feaster Foundation while he was still a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. To date, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit has awarded $25,000 in scholarships to students around the country who embody the foundation’s philosophy, while mentoring hundreds more and sparking creation of five new nonprofits.
The organization’s “lift as you climb” motto reflects Feaster and his team’s approach to creating a lasting ecosystem for opportunity and empowerment. Recently, the organization entered a new phase, developing a curriculum to help students start their own nonprofits and teach them the value of “servant-leadership” through community service.
“We can be a lot more intentional about increasing opportunities that are available to underrepresented minorities here in this nation, especially given the history of what so many minorities have had to endure,” Feaster said. “It’s about realizing the future for equal opportunity and equal access, but also truly building a sustainable and thriving community centered on empathy, on compassion and appreciating diversity and equity. There are so many problems in society that are pervasive, but that just means that the solutions have to be just as pervasive.”
Engineering an ‘oasis’ with food and wine
An extension of Feaster’s dedication to service is in preparing and creating spaces for people to feel relaxed and comfortable, be it through cooking — his “de-stressor” activity — or his most recent venture, winemaking.
“I like people to feel like they have an oasis where they can take a load off and rest,” Feaster said. “To be able to share a bottle of wine that I made with love and care, and to see people enjoy it — or even to get feedback on it — is enjoyable because it just allows me to get better and grow in different ways. I appreciate those challenges. It’s about having the space to be able to help and to serve others, even if it’s just over a meal or a glass of wine.”
Feaster’s foray into wine production began when he and a few friends went on a tasting excursion in Napa Valley, where they experienced a subpar glass of wine and discussed what might have gone wrong.
“We were like, ‘OK, what happened here? What would we need to do instead?’” Feaster explained. “Then I thought, ‘How hard is it; could we do this?’ Whenever I start thinking of things that we could try, I get excited. I’m like, ‘I’m a chemist, I can figure this out,’ and I just fell into it. It was such an interesting space.”
In 2019, Feaster and his friend Bianca began their winemaking experiment, purchasing all the necessary equipment to create a sterile environment — including fermenters, carboy containers and siphons — and set up operations at his mentor’s home in San Francisco. Feaster’s first batch taught him a valuable lesson. After bottling his Cabernet Sauvignon, he tasted it too soon and thought he had made a mistake. But he kept the bottles and went back to them years later, finding their flavor had improved dramatically.
“I learned that sometimes it takes time for things to gel,” Feaster said. “Ultimately, that’s a good lesson in general, when it comes to research and in life, that sometimes I’ve got to give myself grace and to be patient. Things might be where they need to be, but sometimes it just takes a little bit of time for it to really kind of all come together, but when it does, it could be something beautiful.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Feaster pivoted to an expanded space and turned a large closet at his home into a winery, adding secondary equipment and areas to store and age the bottles. He makes about six cases of wine a year, enough for him to enjoy and give out as gifts to friends and family.
For Feaster, the enjoyment he gets from the hobby comes from expressing his creativity by balancing the different variables required to create each varietal and concocting their flavor profiles. In some ways, winemaking echoes his work in the lab, where he designs 3D-printed electrochemical reactors that convert air into fertilizer and carbon dioxide into valuable products such as plastics or fuels.
“I’m a chemist at heart, so I very much rely on my experience in the lab to help guide me through the process, whether it’s just doing accurate measurements, or being very thorough with cleaning,” Feaster said. “It’s a really cool way to do chemistry outside the lab.”
The road to each batch begins with the “story of the grapes,” Feaster said, and factors in where they were grown, whether the growing season was wet or dry, how much sunlight the grapes received and the contact time the wine had with the skins of the grapes, which can all affect flavor.
To source his starting material, Feaster visits vineyards in the Livermore area and talks to local winemakers. He purchases his grapes pre-crushed into a liquid “must” — the juice containing the fruit pulp, skins, stems and seeds. Starting with the must, Feaster begins a primary fermentation process, adding yeast and other ingredients to convert the sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Feaster can predict how much alcohol the wine will contain based on the Brix level — the grams of sugar in 100 grams of the liquid — or based off its specific gravity, the liquid’s density that can be measured by a hydrometer.
The primary fermentation process takes several weeks, allowing for the sugar to fully convert to alcohol. During the process, Feaster performs measurements and calculations to track the progression of the reaction. The next step is the secondary fermentation, where Feaster taps into his culinary side, adding ingredients to give the wine different flavors. For his 2022 Syrah, Feaster infused the wine with fresh American oak, giving it more tannins and producing a more metallic or bitter taste. Once satisfied with the flavor profile, Feaster moves to the bottling process. Then the “waiting game” begins.
“It’s a matter of letting it age and letting it mature,” Feaster said. “A lot of people in the lab have that background of studying aging and the degradation processes, and that’s effectively what’s happening. You’re getting all these chemicals that are getting extracted and maturing to the point where it’s reaching the right composition that allows it to interact with your tastebuds and with your palate to give it all the wonderful flavors that you want.”
So far, Feaster has made seven batches of wine of several different varietals. He is currently making a 2022 Rosé — a pinkish varietal that absorbs some color from the grape skins, but not enough to become a red wine — and a Syrah, a darker, fuller red wine. Feaster said his best year was 2020, where his Pinot Noir received many compliments, and his Rosé from that vintage remains his favorite creation to date.
“I don’t know what it was about that first year of the pandemic — if had something to do with the wildfires or what — but that Rosé was pretty solid; I’m not going to lie,” Feaster said. “It was fruitful. It was just very pleasant. It’s something that you could literally see yourself drinking on a porch or patio somewhere.”
Ingrained with an entrepreneurial spirit, Feaster isn’t ruling out scaling up the hobby into a business venture, joking that winemaking might be his “retirement plan.” But while he dreams of possibly owning his own vineyard someday, he’s not quitting his day job anytime soon, where he strives to reduce greenhouse gases in the environment and make an impact on sustainability and climate change.
For others considering making wine themselves, Feaster has some words of wisdom that could apply to any new endeavor: Done is better than perfect, getting good takes time and it’s ok to fail.
“If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly at first,” Feaster explained. “When a child is learning how to walk, they might stand up, but then they fall down. We don’t shoot down the dreams of the child and say, ‘you’re terrible at walking, why are you still trying?’; we encourage them. Whether it’s trying to make wine or starting out with research or starting anything, the mentality we try to make sure we’re embodying is to give yourself grace. It’s OK if it doesn’t work the first couple of times or if it takes you longer compared to somebody else. This is your path; this is your story. And if we keep at it, ultimately things are going to click.”
