Cologne

From Dusseldorf we headed to Cologne for a tour of Rastal the glass designers. In a country of automation, it was refreshing to see a place with few robots controlling their product. If Rick from Uber is reading this, I'd like to tell him that I saw next years SIB/PIB glasses being made. It is a small world after all. After Rastal we left to see a Kolsh brewery in all of its automative glory. This brewery was unique in that it didn't employ a boil kettle rather it utilized a few mixing tanks that held the wort at near boiling temps for hop utilization and formation of break material and then sent the wort to an evaporator to expel the DMS. Later, we found the largest church I've ever been in and were spellbound for at least an hour.

On the subject of automation, I've been told that the reason the German people are so cutting edge in the field of automation is that after the war most of their workforce was absent. In the early fifties, bottling lines were mostly filled with women. The need for automation was born out of necessity.