Darmstädter Privatbrauerei Tour
September 18th, 2009
A group of about 24 people made a visit to the local brewery here in Darmstadt, the trip was organised by Ed from EUMETSAT.
The tour around the brewery was very interesting and we all gained an insight into the world of beir making. The tour guide did a great job considering she did not speak much english, but luckily one of the group stepped forward and translated for us – a big thanks to the translator. We were shown how the beir is produced (bottom fermentation as opposed to top fermentation process – its all in the yeast), followed by a walk around the bottling plant. Darmstädter brewery produces around 50,000HL of beer a year, that is a lot of beir but compared to the other main local brewery (Pfungstädter produces circa 300,000 HL) is a small amount. Some smaller breweries bring there beir in tankers to this brewery to make use of the bottling plant, Darmstädter brewery has special equipment for cleaning and filling flip-top bottles.
No trip is complete without a bit of “tasting” as the tour guide called it, we were led into a small room with 3 rows of tables and served a plate of wurst mit brotchen (cold suasage with bread rolls). To help us digest the food we were plied with several glasses of beir, well you have to try all the different types …. Pils, Zwickel, Maerzen (Dark beir) and Dunkel Weizen (wheat beir).
A big thank you to Ed for organising a very impressive tour!
Once again crates (20×0,5l) of Oktoberfest bier can be found in the Getränkemarkt (drink shops), this year I was especially pleased to find the local Profi Getränkemarkt was selling Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest Märzen bier.