My Sincerest Apologies

For those who follow this regularly and haven't seen an update in roughly three weeks, I apologize. It would seem that a hour break to write an update for your family and friends would be a pretty achievable task, but I assure you, it has been much more difficult than that. The past three weeks have passed in the blink of an eye. Now that nearly all of my classmates have returned to the states and I am not on any schedule, I have the chance to share some of the things I have been doing.

Friday, April 15, 2011 we took our essay style final exam so most of the week was dedicated to studying for that. One thing that I am thankful for is that I put a lot of time into studying during my stay in Chicago so it was more of a review than anything.

Earlier in the week we brewed a batch according to a spec which I believe was set by a customer of Doemens for research purposes. It is pretty cool to be doing research brewing!


Above is the inside of our mash tun. The four vessel system we use at school was fabricated by Steinecker which is part of the AG Krones group, one of the premier bottling and brewhouse manufacturers.


A good size sight glass (pictured above) is used to ensure the lauter bed is effectively filtering the wort from the grains.


All of the brewhouse equipment is fitted with special site glasses, allowing for easy visualization of the process.


The inside of our wort kettle is pictured above. The other really awesome part about working on this system is that it is run almost fully automatic. The brew day that week, I was able to get a lot of experience using the Siemens system (even though everything is in German) which I was really excited about.

The week finished up with bottling in which I ran the "cellar" portion along with Viet, Nolan and Shaun. We spent the day ensuring that beer was flowing to the filler and notifying the line when we were changing beers. We also spent a lot of time cleaning which I enjoyed.

The weekend was full of partying in celebration of our completion of the class portion of the program. On Saturday we went to Dachau, which was probably the most depressing place I have been. Monday, April 18th, started the European brewing tour, so we packed and moved out of the Euro Youth to catch our bus at 7AM.

Location:Munich, Germany