Week 9

Monday: My how time is flying. I am starting to settle into a schedule here in Germany. We started our week by studying Fermentation, Maturation and Storage of Lager beer. We did Microbiological Acidification, and another beer styles tasting and study. This time it was wheat beer and we mostly talked about hefeweizen.

Lastly we had four more hours of Chemical Technical Analysis . It was pretty cool we got to see a Friabilimeter, which will tell you exactly how modified your malt is. We also studied wort and beer analysis.

Tuesday: They split the class into four groups and gave us each a scenerio, but this time we had a shorter time to research and it has centered around microbiological stability. Our group had a relativly easy situation where we were a brewery producing lager and we were also producing a wheat beer. We we tasked with determining which was a more stable product. We also were taught about Yeast Propagation as well as continuing our styles tasting of wheat beer.





Dunkel weizen and Krystal weizen

 With the rest of our day we learned about High Gravity Brewing, which is not necessarily strong beer, it's a method of beer production mostly done by larger breweries to save space and produce more beer. Lastly we had an hour long lecture on the German Purity Law. It's an interesting subject that only really applies to the Germans but has led to some great brewing innovations.

Wednesday: We spent a couple of hours working on our case studies, then another styles tasting. Continuing with our wheat beer discussions we studied and tried a Berliner wiesse, and a Weizenbock. After lunch it was two hours of Quality Management, then to round out the day we gave our presentations on our case study's. Were were told this was mostly a practice for those of us doing the masters program. It was an interesting project that I felt was more about working in a group, then about the material we presented.

Thursday: Thursday was a pretty fun day. We had our Introduction to the Filling Plant with Max Roithmeier. This was basically a whole day of him walking us through the bottling line at Doemens.

Max explaining the bottle washer

One of the best parts of the day was when it was decided that part of the lecture on bottle filling would be done out side where the weather was about 23 degrees C (73 F). Towards the end of the day the class started to thin out, which I thought was very disconcerning because at the end if the day we were taught that the most dangerous piece of equipment there was the labeler. So now only about a third of the class knows exactly how it works and how dangerous it really is...fantastic!!!

Friday: Friday was another nice short day. We had a 2 hour lecture on Quality Managment and we did our final styles tasting for this segment. We tried German ale's this time.

Kolsch and Alt

After class I got into a car with the canadians Jess and Bryce and Kyle (he is from Kentucky). We headed south towards the alps and arived at Neuschwanstein Castle mid afternoon. After a pretty awesome calf burning hike up the hill (man I'm out of shape) we took a tour and were generally just wowed by the place.

After that we stared driving along the Alpinestrauß, which goes through the alps. The views were absolutely breath taking. We decided to stay the night in Innsbrook, Autria. It is an university town nestled in between the mountains. We had dinner and a few beers then retired for the evening.

View from our hotel balcony

Saturday: The next day we got up, had some food and hit the road. We spent most of the day driving through the alps going from Austria back to Germany and so on. The weather was fantastic and we saw some breathtaking views. Truely a magical part of this planet. We got back to Munich at around 6:00pm and had a nice relaxing evening.

Sunday: Sunday was a chore day for me. I booked a hostel for when my brother, and two friends get here in May. I also did laundry and that sort of thing. All in all another fantastic week.