First times at Doeman's

It's been three days at Doeman's Academy for Beer, Food and Beverage and I've been having a blast. The campus has many classrooms, laboratories, a brewery (shown here), a bottling line, a bottle washer and a cafeteria. It's a German school that dates back to the late 1800's although this campus was built in the 1960's. The Siebel class is the only class taught in English.

Monday was devoted to getting things at home together and getting over jet lag. Yesterday half of the class including me brewed a traditional Bavarian Wheat on the Doeman's pilot system. Notice the open fermenter that Brad is filling and the horizontal brite tanks that Jeff is leaning against. I wanted to take a nap on the bags of Weyermann malt.

I believe that one of the teachers plotted against us and set the grind on the mill too fine. We tried to lauter for three hours before giving up and adding malt extract! Everything went wrong that day. Our teacher Bjorn was very considerate about all the mistakes. With any luck we won't mess up the Pilsner scheduled for next week. Brian and I put the spent grain in one of our teacher's 7 series and drove it a kilometer to a dairy farm. Only in Munich, huh? We actually got to dump the grain for the cows. So that's why all of Munich smells of manure! There are farms in the center of towns.

The brew day took eleven hours. After school the guys thought it would be nice to head up to Augustiner Keller for some real German beer and food. I'll get more pictures of this. We drank liters of Helles and Maximator and ate pig's knuckle and snitzel.

I love Germany. I could live here. There are many things about Germany that I won't explain here, but I love it. I really should have learned the language; I always wanted to.

Remember how I was excited about the spring? It's 34F and snowing here. Arrgh. I can't escape the snow.