David's World » Germany

Darmstädter Privatbrauerei Tour

dynamo-dave — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:37:05 +0000

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!

Oktoberfest Bier 2009

dynamo-dave — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:43:28 +0000

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.

I may not be able to get down to Munich for the real fest, but here in Haus Richards we are doing our best to enjoy the bier !

Living in Germany

dynamo-dave — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:24:26 +0000

We moved to Germany in April 1998, we only intended to be here for a couple of years but have now been here for 11 years !!

Our three children have been going to the local German school instead of an international school and have learned German, there English is pretty good as this is the language used at home. Sometimes it has been difficult as the kids have argued with each other in German as they know we cannot keep up with them.