das Bier

This post has come far too late for my taste.

After castles, or probably before castles, most people associate Germany with beer. Honestly though, for a people as world-renown for their beer as the Germans there are fewer drunks here than you would expect. Of course, when we walk through the park we see the Park Drunks, but they are more like a street musician. Radolfzell also has that one pudgy guy who walks around wearing nothing but a red skirt drinking cocktails on market day, but he is actually quite nice, and I think he might have a job in addition to being utterly ridiculous.

In any case, we took a trip to a German brewery in the town of Donaueschingen. The brewery is called Fürstenberg, and it is pink.

The brewery tour was very interesting. I was actually very curious about the deutsche Reinheitsgebot and how it affects beer today.  Basically the law is old as dirt and says that the only thing you're allowed to make beer with is water, barley, and hops. The law is from Bavaria and is also from the 1500s. If you were paying attention, you will notice that this beer recipe actually doesn't include yeast. This is largely because microorganisms really hadn't been discovered yet. So later they got added. I don't think the law is actually part of Germany's legal system anymore, but beers will still (proudly) advertise that they are brewed according to the law.

During the tour we got to taste most of these ingredients before they were used to make beer. They all pretty much taste like oatmeal, cornflakes, or other breakfast cereals. 

Here are all the ingredients in their different forms. The hops are at the bottom, in their original form on the left and then in their current pelleted form on the right. Above the hops is the barley. The darker barley on the left is used to make dunkel bier, and it's really the same thing except the barley is roasted a little. This way they can give the beer color and a slightly different taste without using any artificial flavors or colors.

The rest of the tour explained the beer making process. During this time, I learned a fun fact about foreign language: if you stop listening for more than a few sentences, you're pretty much screwed for understanding anything after that. This can be useful when, for instance, you want to ignore salesepeople. You can literally allow yourself to not understand a word they say. It's wild! You don't even feel guilty because you don't even realize they're saying words. Anyways, here is a part of brewery that, I think, has something to do with imparting the hop and barley tastes to the beer. Don't quote me on that.

So after this we were led into a cellar that looked like the opening scene of a zombie movie. After that they must have felt bad for us, since they took us directly to the testing area and we were allowed to 'try' as many beers as we wanted. My friend Geoff, whose ability to talk to people astounds me constantly, got our tour guide to sit down and drink little with us. We talked about 9/11, beer, and politics. Basically typical German small talk. If you ever try Fürstenberg, I recommend the Edelbräu or the Dunkelweizen.

We left the brewery, a bit tipsy, and we were astonished to discover it was still light outside. That was jarring, but not entirely unwelcome.