All Future Beer Students,
The base level knowledge you will need to understand the course is Organic Chemistry I. The Chemistry of Beer course will look at the compounds in the ingredients and how they are transformed into beer. It would be helpful to know the functional groups, organic structure notation, acid-base mechanism, nucleophilic substitution, and resonance structures.
Although the course is an upper division course, we are taking the approach that many of the students may only have a limited knowledge of organic chemistry and biochemistry. This course is a nice review and should be helpful as a resource for the Chemistry of Beer course.