Mash Tuns and Network Porn (Day 4 of Germany)

Yeah... funny title, I guess. Maybe not. Oh...this one may have more spelling errors than the others. I'll get around to editing it.

Wednesday morning, May 27th, 2009.

Prior to our trip, I had decided that one thing I really needed to experience in Germany was a real German brewery. Everyone hears about Germans and beer and most of you know that I'm REALLY into beer. There is one particular beer that I really had an interest in: Köstritzer (prounounced almost like KER-strits-a...but the "r" in "ker" ir almost silent). The brewery for Köstritzer was in a little town in the Federal State of Thuringen called Bad Köstritz (about 300km south of Berlin). As I may have mentioned before, the use of the "er" at the end of a German word usually means "from" wherever is in front of the "er." For instance: "Frankfurter" is from Frankfurt. "Hamburger" is from Hamburg. "Berliner" would be from Berlin. So, naturally, "Köstritzer" would be from Köstritz (more specifically Bad Köstritz). Anyway...Köstritzer is one of my favorite beers. They make a style called Schwarzbier which literally translates into "Black Beer." Most people who do not know beer like many of my friends associate black or dark beers as "stronger" or "heavier" or they compare it to beers like Guinness (a dry stout). Schwarzbier is different. In fact, it usually bears the nickname "Black Pilsner" because it's rather light bodied and just a bit sweet, as far as beers go.

I found the website for Köstritzer in March or April and sure enough, they had an email address to contact them with any questions or concerns. Coincidentally, if any of you want to visit their website, it is http://www.koestritzer.de/. I mentioned in my email that my wife and I would be visiting Germany during the last week of May and enquired about the possibility of touring the brewery. It only took a couple days for me to get a response from a young lady named Susan Ringelhan. She was very nice through the email and was very welcoming and invited us to the brewery. We set the date for May 27th and a tentative time of around 1pm.

That was all just to lay a little groundwork for this day's events, fyi.

So, we're up this morning at 6am, like usual during our trip. Bathed, teeth brushed, etc and we were getting ready to leave. Since we damn near missed out on getting a hotel room when we first arrived in Berlin, I decided that now would be a good time to try and locate a hotel and book reservations for tonight in the little town of Bad Köstritz. So, I paid the 5 Euros to access the T-Mobile wi-fi for an hour and made the search for hotels. Found one called the Goldner Löwe (Golden Lion). It had great reviews, the place looked gorgeous, and the price was not bad, so we booked it. That was a little sense of relief since we now knew that we would not have to worry about that once we got into town.

Since our room in the Alfa was on the top floor, we actually had access to the roof. It was very cold this morning but my wife wanted to go out onto the roof and take pictures of the cty of Berlin from the perspective of the roof of our hotel. Of course, there was one building with a big "Mazda" sign on it right in the way of much of it but hey, it was still Berlin, and we still got some pitcures.


We took our bags to the Punto and went back into the Hotel to eat breakfast. We had decided it would just be easier to have breakfast there, regardless of the cost, so we could head out relatively soon. Of course, as usual, breakfast consisted of the typical meats, cheeses, and soft boiled eggs that I was quickly becoming accustomed to. I actually enjoyed our Deli breakfasts. While sitting at breakfast, I sent a quick reminder email to Susan at Köstritzer that we would be there around 1pm (1300). She responded almost right away and said that she and Mrs. Voigt were looking forward to our arrival.

After breakfast, we both grabbed a Coke Light from the Imbiss next door, got in the car, plugged the address for Bad Köstritz into the BlackBerry, and off we went. Not gonna lie. Getting out of Berlin was sort of a pain in the ass. But we got out. The traffic heading out of the city was not bad at all but looking at the traffic on the opposite side of the Autobahn coming INTO the city was horrendous. I was so thankful that we were not in that line of cars that never seemed to end. I was happy to be headed the other way. The trip to Bad Köstritz was fairly uneventful, really. Made a couple stops along the way but nothing really to note (that I can remember. It has been 5 months since our trip, now).

When we pulled off the Autobahn and onto the smaller highway that would take us to Bad Köstritz, that's when it realy and truly looked like the Germany you see in pictures. The small two-lane highway that would take us into Bad Köstritz was interrupted frequesntly with these very small towns and clusters of homes and barns. The highway was small and curvy with little hills every now and then. It truly reminded me of driving on the roads of East Tennessee. I felt at home.

After several km, I could finally see the main building that bore the name of the brewery that I so wanted to explore. There it was. Köstritzer. I dare say that my wife was nowhere near as excited as I was but she was down for it and was having fun, regardless. As of now, it was only noon so we still had an hour before I had committed to meeting Susan and Mrs. Voigt at the brewery. We parked the car at the end of Heinrich-Shütz-Straße (that was the main drag throught the little town. The brewery was on it, the hotel was on it... if you're in Bad Köstritz, you're probably on Heinrich-Shütz-Straße. After parking the car, we decided to walk the street for a little bit and kill some time before our meeting at the brewery. We found the neatest little shop. Yeah, it had candles, ornaments, and other typically female things but I thought it was very cool. We ended up buying a little ornament for our door at home that said "Willkommen" on it. It's in the shape of a sheep. Pretty cool.

Closer to 1300, we went ahead and headed down to the brewery. Susan saw us from inside the office and came out with Mrs. Voigt to greeet us. It was a little awkward, I guess, because it was only the 4 of us. Me, my wife, Susan, and Mrs. Voigt. The great thing was that it was our own private tour of the brewery that makes the best beer in the world....nice. Susan explained to us that Mrs. Voigt normally guides the tours but because she spoke no English, Susan would be guiding us with Mrs. Voigt to translate.

The town and the acreage that the brewery was on smelled absolutely delightful. The whole place smelled like a mash. If you don't know what a mash is or better yet what one even smells like, find a local brewpub and ask them when they'll be brewing again and ask if you can come in while they're mashing so you can smell it. My wife equates the smell to warm Grape Nuts. Mashing is the process of applying a specific volume of water at a specific temperature at a specific ratio to the lbs of grains to a specific amount of grains at a specific pH in order to convert the starch in the grains into sugar that can be fermented by the yeast in order to make beer. I hope you can follow that. I tried to make it fairly simple.

The tour was fantastic. We got to see some of the historical advertisements for the beer. They had a little frame on the wall that had various types of malted grains and I asked them if they used Pilsener, Munich, and Carafa Special in their beer and Mrs. Voigt confirmed that they did use those three malts. That made me want to brew one up, of course. Then, they showed us some of the hops that were in a little container on a table. If you;ve never smelled hops before, they really stink until you get used to them. Then you actually start looking forward to that smell. I asked again if they were Hallertau hops and she confirmed that they were. NICE!

They then guided us into the brewhouse and it was awesome! The brewer opened up the mash tun so I could see the decoction mash going on inside of it. It smelled so damn good in there. Then we saw the lauter tun and the boil kettle. They obviously could not open the portal tot he boil kettle as all of the pressure from the boil would have potentially blown the door off the hinges and kill us. I didn't need killin' that day so I was ok with the door remaining closed.

After the brewhouse, they took us into the filtering room where the beer travels straight from the fermenters, through the filtering system, and off to packaging. Off to the side of that room was an office that 3 men were sitting in and monitoring the 38 fermenters that they have. They also had a little machine that showed the current temps of the fermenters, and the amount of CO2 pressure in there. In Germany, they let the yeast carbonate the beer naturally as it is fermenting. They only allow a little of the CO2 out during fermentation. All part of the Reinheitsgebot. One of the guys came out of the control room (they all had on lab coats, by the way). He grabbed 2 glasses that looked to be about half-pint each and tapped a beer for me and my wife. That's right. Straight from the damn fermenter. This beer has never been in a bottle, keg, can, anything. So. Effing. Good. After that, we went to the packaging facility where they were bottling, kegging, washing bottles, etc. The bottles would move through the line so fast and the beer sprayed into them at such a high rate, it was almost hard to believe that they were actually filling bottles and not just wasting beer.

After the tour, Susan and Mrs. Voigt opened the gift shop for us. It wasn't scheduled to open for a little while longer but they had us in there, anyway. It was pretty cool. They had glasses, bottle openers, shirts, jackets, and some other random things. But it was all centered around a bar that of course served their beers. Mrs. Voigt poured us a couple beers (the employees included--hey, they work at a brewery) and we all sat around for about 45 minutes just chatting about life and differences in cultures. I learned that Bad Köstritz used to be under the East german flag. I learned that the vast majority of the brewery's employees did not live in Bad Köstritz and that almost everyone who lived in Bad Köstritz commuted elsewhere for work. Sort of backwards. I learned that Susan Ringelhan had a degree in Business Psychology from a University in Switzerland and learned English so that all of the students had a common language in which to communicate. I bought a couple trinkets and a very nice beer mug with the Köstritzer logo on it.

Before we said our goodbyes to Susan and Mrs. Voigt, we asked where we should go for a little afternoon and evening entertainment. They suggested that we either drive 20km to Jena or 60km to Leipzig. She really suggested that Leipzig would have far more for us to do than Jena (pr Yenna) so we decided to check that out. We said our goodbyes and went to find lunch!

We found a little restaurant in a town that basically adjoined Bad Köstritz called Gera. The restaurant was a quaint place where the waitresses were dressed fairly traditionally German. They didn't really speak English but after 3 days of being submerged into the country, I was actually starting to understand a whole lot more than before. I ordered this amazing steak that came folded with some sort of cheese in it. The cheese was the consistency of paste, though, so it wasn't like a melted creamy cheese. It was so good. Mushrooms and beer would accompany my main course again and I was in heaven. Outside of the little restaurant was a church than was again very old. We took a bunch of pictures of it (I took a lot of building photos while we were there).

We headed back to the Autobahn to go to Leipzig and after a few km, we decided that we really didn't want to spend that long in the Punto after our trip from Berlin earlier in the day. So, we turned around and headed toward the town of Jena. What a cool little town. There is a University there and we parked just off the main strip of restaurants and bars. The scenery was similar to any other college town. Young students bustling through the streets, in and out of shops, bars, hanging with friends... We ended up at this bar called Cheers that was an American themed bar. All the beer tap handles had labels of American craft beers but the selection of beers was all German, despite the appearance of the handles. The bar was covered in American posters, mostly sprts. NFL teams, MLB teams... they even had an MLB game on the TV that was being broadcast on ESPN Europe. We ordered some fries and she had a milkshake. All the tables at Cheers were reserved for something so we asked the bar tender about it. THe Chamions League final was on that night so they had tables reserved for customers who had been smart enough to reserve them.

We settled our tab and walked around the busy strip for a bit before heading back to the Punto. On the way back to Bad Köstritz, we stopped in this very small town to take some more pictures. There was a church again but this one had a date on the gate. 1135. Wow... Looking at that church in a town that was undoubtedly unchanged by growth in the past 900 years was awesome.

We get back to the Goldner Löwe and have a couple beers in the Hotel restaurant before eading upstairs. We caught the end of the game in which Barcelona beat Manchester United for the CHampions League title. Apparently it was a pretty good match.

Now, here's the interesting part. This game was being played on a regular network style channel. Much like our NBC, CBS, etc. As soon as the game was over...I mean within seconds... a show came on that featured the life of a female porn star. No, not just her life outside the studio. Not really about her life at the grocery store or laundry, or day to day activities. Nope. This was about her filming the porn. Was it edited? Nope. Was it interesting. Well, of course. :) But really? Network Porn? I love Europe.

Before bed, I decided to go ahead and book our hotel for the next night. We had decided to go ahead and make thr trip down to the border of Austria and Bavaria to see the castle Neuschwanstein. She was very excited to go there. I have to admit, I was looking forward to it, too. Booked a nice looking bed and breakfast right in town, drank another beer, opened the wondows, and turned off the lights.