Category: About A Good Beer Blog

Knut Travels South to Freising, Bavaria

Freising, Bavaria, Germany. A quiet little town dozing on a crisp Sunday morning, an excellent place for a stroll – and a few beers. Why Freising? For a beer lover, it has the obvious advantage of being the home of Weihenstephan, which claims to be the oldest brewery in the world, and that obviously makes it stand out from other Bavarian towns. Combine this with it being just off the runway of Munich international airport, and it really makes sense. So, if you have a few hours in transit, go straight for the arrivals hall and look for the sign pointing you to buses. Bus 635 takes you to the Freising railway station in 20 minutes, and it runs all day.

First a stroll through the largely empty streets. The cathedral dominates the highest hill, with views of the rural landscape surrounding you like those shown above. Click for a bigger version of the view. There is surprisingly little noise from the airport, more some from the church bells. Downhill again, zigzagging through the old town with picturesque homes and shops that look pricey, but, this being Germany, they are all closed on Sunday. I enter the main square, and the sun is warm enough to stop at a café with tables outside and where the sign tell me I can have a glass of Franziskaner Weisse. The waiter promptly bring me this, and I sip my beer enjoying the Sunday quietness. The beer, an unfiltered hefe, is a proper representative of its kind, no doubt about that, and it tastes good. Still, it lacks some bitterness and freshness that I seem to recall from the bottled version. It is one of Roger Protz 300 beers, but I don’t know if it deserves such a rating. There is a church next to the main square, with the sounds of music from the organ and the congregation singing their hymns drifting out to me and a few other customers not attending the service. (I believe there are others inside the café having brunch, too.) A plaque on the church wall commemorates the heroes of Freising from World War I. (Well, Norway was neutral in WWI, so we don’t have much to boast about!) I fish out my book (the new one by PD James, bought on the airport that morning), and order a Spaten Helles, also in the Protz book. I go for a small one, as I feel I should have some lunch soon. This beer is not a beer to die for, a rather flat and boring brew. It may be the victim of the 7 minute law, so I will try the bottled version if the occasion arises.

I ask for the bill (amazingly I’ve managed to get by using my rusty school German), and aim for the Weihestephan brewery, which is well signposted. This is a brisk walk uphill again, past a beer garden closed down for the winter and through parts of Weihestephan Technical College – the brewery is a part of this complex. On a Sunday, the brewery is closed, but I aim for the brewery tap, which is bustling at lunchtime. I find a seat in a vaulted cellar, and order a Hefe Weisse, which is much better than the one I had earlier. Properly served, and nice to sip while I study the old fashioned menu, heavy on roasted dishes. I go for the Brewer’s Plate, which include sauerkraut, roast pork, smoked pork, potato dumplings, liver dumplings and deep fried onion rings. With beer gravy. I finish with a draft pils, which is the best beer of the day. A very aromatic beer, as far removed from Becks and its clones as possible. Lots of taste from both the malt and the hops. Lovely.

I have to get back, but not before buying a souvenir pack of 6 of their beers to take home. I even bought a bottle of beer liquor especially made for the restaurant. Have your tasted it, sir, enquires the barman when I ask for it. I tell him no, and he kindly pours me a shot. It does not taste of beer at all – a very sweet drink which reminds me of a coffee liquor. But now I have to hurry. A 15 minute walk back to the station, hop on the bus – and I am soon back in the crowd of Flughafen Franz-Josef-Strauss again. I doze off as soon as I sit down in my airplane seat.

Next stop: Bratislava

Not The Cover Of The Rolling Stone

So there I am, in the last paragraph 14th story in The New York Times, Business Section, Media and Advertising page, web edition index at 6:37 am Monday morning with the precious URL, all live and linky:

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No seized web site or anything. No referrers yet as I can see. Oh well. Wait for the entire workforce of New York City to get to work and turn on their computers to slack off for the morning by flipping through the web edition, I suppose…

It was an interesting process being interviewed via email by the reporter who has lots of web industry writing experience but not a homebrewer or anything. She noticed this post I made January on the nutty idea of an “open source beer”. Too bad they did not use the full quote – which I thought was really helpful – but, true, would have needed a separate section:

I have not tried the but think from what is provided that I would not like to try to make it or drink it. Making the beer would be difficult for most homebrewers given the volumes provided. Most homebrewers brew in lots of 20 litre or perhaps double that but an 80 litre boil as required in this recipe would find the brewer facing over 200 pounds of boiling sticky sugar syrup needing transferring by the brewer, a near impossible task in the average kitchen. By contrast, even the small end of the microbrewing scene expects an entry point at the 5 or 7 barrel scale of brewery. One barrel of beer is about 170 litres. Here is some information from the brewery manufacturer DME: which may help understand the scale: http://www.dmeinternational.com/brewing/brewbup/naturalbrew.html. So it is unclear for whom this scale of recipe is devised. Recipes can be scaled up or down but you might want to start with a point that is useful – or even safe – for one type of brewer or another.

That being said, there are issues with the ingredients, too. Beer is basically made of four things: water, yeast, hops and malt. In this recipe, there is detail provided about only hops and malt. As a result, it the same ingredients were used and made with the soft water of Dublin or the hard water of Burton-upon-Trent, England, the resulting products would be very different. These effects can be reproduced by adding water treatments which mimic one location or another. But without any guidance as to water quality, there is a great deal of variation left to the imagination of the brewer. The same is the case of the yeast. The recipe does not tell us whether it is lager yeast or ale yeast, the two general hemispheres of the beer world. Further, it does not state which of sub-type might be used. Consider this web page of a homebrew supplier which offers 33 ale yeasts and 16 for lager, aside from the 18 for the specialized wheat and Belgian styles of beer: http://www.paddockwood.com/index.php. Selection among these yeasts will greatly affect the outcome of the brewing process. But no guidance is given.

Where there is some guidance, we are still uncertain. We are told that “1 kg of caramel malt” is required. That usually defines a class of malts with a sugary aspect but they differ in the taste they impart according, among other factors, to the degree they are roasted. As a result, a pale crystal malt may give a slight nuttiness to a beer where a dark one provides a strong raisiny flavour. Just saying “caramel malt” in not specific enough. Similarly, the recipe includes 4 kg of sugar but we are not told if it is corn or cane, light yellow or dark demarara or even whether Belgian candi sugar is to be used. Sugar is not sugar is not sugar.

So in the end it is very difficult to determine what a brewer might do with the recipe as it is really only part of a recipe. If you take the information provided and run it through a popular beer recipe calculator used by homebrewers for planning you get a beer which is somewhat pale and normal strength at 5.2% but a bit cloying due to the moderate hops and likely richness of some residual sugars. It would also have no to very rich yeastiness with anything from a slight nuttiness to a strong raisin flavour. Here are the results from when I ran the test: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator?6074722#tag. Except for the odd ingredient “300 g Guarana beans” this could be half the beers I have ever encountered depending on how the unstated variables are addressed by the particular brewer. It is interesting to note that guarana bean is included in the new Budweiser product, B-to-the-E: this author does not find that product very pleasant: http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/news/beerman/beer_20024917.shtml

I do go on, don’t I.

Who Are You?

Any lurkers want to speak up? This is going to be another banner month here with about 9500 unique visitors and about 43,000 visits. About 26,000 of those visits are via RSS which I think means you are using an aggregator to read this – meaning you chose the site rather than stumbled on it. I still figure about 85000 of the uniques are search engine visits, maybe one timers, like those confused guys from the White House who show up looking for the results of seaching Google for “Kerry policies” which for reasons entirely beyond me Lord Goog places me today at #2.¹

Anyway, who are you? You who choose this place, whose statistical relevence keeps me interested in getting up an hour earlier weekdays to blab about something. Really, other than Hans…are you all connected to Heuvelton, too? What really kills me about google is I am #10 for “Heuvelton blog” but #2 for “kerry policies”. Please consider this when you push the value on the stockmarket to greater than Ford and GM combined. Please consider the meaning of bubble.

What Is Going On Here?

I have spent the last day transferring posts from our sister-station Gen X at 40 and I think I have most of the reviews, pub photos and book reviews. I am hoping I can attract a few other beer writers to join me here but for now it will be mainly me. Rumours are rife that my Server Lords over at silverorange are planning some kind of beery redesign here which, given the magnitude of their recent work, is quite an honour. Stay tuned.

Requests, comments and offers to write most welcome.

Five Hundred

Five hundred posts in around nine months. I received my congratulatory prizes from Portland the other day: a T-shirt from a deep sea fishing outfit from California and a wind-up radio that includes a warning not to wind up until the batteries have had 5 hours charge from a 12 volt adapter (not included). So in honour of the passage of time a side-by-side shot to the southwest from the dome.

Two images of the same view mid-19th century and early 21st

 

I noticed the older photo down a hallway at work, a view from the dome of City Hall which I have twinned with one of my own from a couple of weeks ago. According to the St. George’s Cathedral history, the older photo must be from between 1838 and 1862 as you can see the second larger dome built in the latter year is not present. So it is around 150 years older than my shot from the other day. The church’s predecessor, more on the actual market square the row of houses to the bottom of each photo face, is the location of the declaration of government in Ontario in 1792:

John Stuart, “Father of the Anglican Church in Upper Canada”, was the Rector. On July 8th, Lieutenant Governor John Simcoe, standing on the steps of St. George’s Church, took “the required oaths” of office and read the Royal Commissions, thus connecting St. George’s with the beginnings of provincial government in Ontario.

The actual date of the first European settlement in Kingston was 1673 by the French at Fort Frontenac. La Salle, the great explorer [after whom a car was named and referenced in the All in the Family theme sung by Archie and Edith Bunker] was the first seigneur and used the fort as a base for his explorations into the interior..which did not turn out all rosy. In 1758 Fort Frontenac was taken by the English. Ransacked and abandoned, it remained unoccupied for the next 25 years. [An interactive map of the entire St. Lawrence area starting with Fort Frontenac in the west from 1776 is here.] In 1783, Major Samuel Holland was sent to survey the condition of the fort, and in the same year temporary barrack facilities were constucted. Sammy is well known in PEI as its first surveyor (though it was only a part of his larger works) and the briefly celebrated namesake of Samuel Holland Institute of Technology (a joke since at least 1993 – scroll down page) which was soon renamed Holland Collage.