Ken Andrews is living a Miller High Life Super Bowl commercial.

He studied at Harvard.

He lives with Barbie.

He wears a tie-dyed lab coat to work.

And, get this, he is paid to improve beer.

He’s every guy’s hero.

Ken is the Bristol Brewing beerologist-zymurgist.

Try saying that after a few Laughing Lab ales.

What he does is serious stuff. He battles icky, invisible-to-the-naked-eye microbes that could ruin your weekend beer buzz.

Thanks to Ken, you can be assured there won’t be any crud in your suds.

“There are nasty microbes out there and if they get in your beer, they’ll spoil it,” he says. “It won’t kill you. It will just taste bad.”

In addition to quality control, he grows hops and runs the tasting program.

Ken, 62, came to Bristol 11 years ago after teaching advanced micro-molecular-and-cell biology at Colorado College for 25 years.

Beer was a hobby during his decades in the sobering Ivory Tower of academia. He homebrewed as a doctoral student at Berkeley — can you say “party school” — and taught a noncredit brew class at CC.

At Bristol, he’s in the hops trenches, on the front lines against microscopic enemy insurgents.

It’s not all Beehive Honey Wheat and pretzels, though.

As he tells people over and over, and without slurring his words: “I say, ‘You know, you gotta work.’ It doesn’t mean you’re slugging down beer right and left all day.”

Right on, Prof. Pass the Beer Nuts.

The malty back room office/lab at the South Tejon Street brewery is a long way from the classroom for the bearded intellectual giant who goes to the gym at lunch to work out.

“I guess I’m sort of like a mad scientist,” he says.

He uses what looks like a double-glass bong to filter out bad beer microbes. (At least that’s his explanation. To me, it looks like something sold in those medical pot shops.)

But Ken’s legit. He pulls out a microscope. Tiny red and clear splotches magically appear on the slide.

“The red ones are not happy,” he says, happily. “This is at the end of a pilsner fermentation cycle, so we expect most of the cells not to be happy.”

Ken’s Ph.D. thesis was on bacterial sugar transport evolution, not beer microbes. But science is science, no matter how you drink it.

Soon Ken will have a view to go with the brew. That’s where the Barbie reference comes in. He and wife Barbara, a Mitchell High School science teacher, are building their dream home, a 17-sided yurt atop a Teller County mountain.

Do some people have the life or what? Ken & Barbie. Double-glass bongs. Paid to drink beer.

I’m in the wrong business.

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Ken Andrews, Bristol Brewing microbiologist Photo by ANDREA BROWN/THE GAZETTE

Andrea Brown, Your Space Columnist Photo by