So we did not eat lunch in the noisy cafeteria, but picked up some bratwurst and fries as takeout from the kebab place next door and walked home and ate at our desks. In our mostly quiet apartment. It was nice.
We went back to the Institut for the 2:30pm Phonetik course. Like the Konversation course, it's one hour per week and optional. Students of all abilities and nationalities are intermingled. About 25 students participated.
The teacher was Frau Frey, whom we had never met before. She is probably about Mama's age. She has delightfully clear pronunciation. We took turns reading contrasting pairs of words to help us hear and speak the differences between similar vowels. It was interesting. Frau Frey was very patient.
The most entertaining part were the Italians who have difficult NOT adding an extra vowel sound at the end of a word that ends in a hard consonant, such as der Wand ("der Wanda") or der Hut ("der Hoota"). Apparently all Italians have this issue and Frau Frey had them keep repeating the word until they could say it without the extra sound being added. It as fascinating. We had students in the course from level A 1.1 (beginners) to level B something or other (a level or two above us). Everyone was trying to improve their pronunciation. It didn't really matter if we did not know the meaning of the words we were practicing as long as we learned the right sounds. We'll do this again next week.
We went home for another hour of study (for Andy) and possibly a short nap (for Amelia) before going back to the Institut at 5pm for the Haller Löwenbräuerei tour and dinner. Haller Löwenbrau is the locally brewed beer served every where in town. In fact, the college students from U. of Michigan tell us it's hard to buy any other beer in town. Beer, of course, is cheaper than cola or water.
We walked across the city to the brewery where we met up with the two guides (Biermeisters), Gert Philipp and Freider Wieland. This is Gert below. He took our half of the group on the tour. We had about 40 or 50 people total.
He explained many things, mostly in German but occasionally in English and sometimes both. This is a private family owned brewery in business since 1724. It has been run by nine generations of the family. It employs about 70 people. This beer is only sold in this immediate region (and it's sold just about everywhere in the vicinity) and not in other parts of Germany (this is common with small German private family breweries) and not in any other country.
Why am I showing you a dumpster? Because this brewery has almost no waste at all. Everything is recycled. This dumpster, for example, is full of labels taken off the recycled bottles. These labels are recycled into other paper products.
The by-product from the brewing process is sold to farmers who come daily to collect it for animal feed.
We toured all over the brewery. We can't explain what most of this equipment does but there was a lot of it, it was huge, some of it was loud, and some of it was very hot.
We watched a film that explains the bottling process. It was interesting. Obviously, we can't tour through the bottling part of the plant because it would be too dangerous with all that moving machinery.
This door leads to the water source down below. When the door is open the pumps are loud. This is the source of all the mineral water used to make the beer and the mineral water the company also bottles (as well as some other non-alcoholic drinks made with the mineral water).
This is the Biermeister's room. Everything is electronic. They made the change from analog some time ago. Every beer making process in the plant can be overseen here.
Here's a view of the same place from the right end.
This family business brews 16 types of beer (and a bunch of mineral water drinks and other soft drinks).
More random shots of huge equipment.
This is where the beer ends up in this huge containers. They hang pretty low so the workers don't have to reach up all the time.
We enjoyed this tour which lasted a couple of hours.
This is the first and only time Andy has drunk beer in the entire time we've been married or even known each other.
Ditto for Amelia.
We each served ourselves via this tap on one of the huge containers. This is the best beer they make, according to the Biermeister. It takes eight weeks to make.
More of the downstairs equipment. We have no idea exactly what this all does but the beer comes out the pointy ends eventually and the noise is pretty loud here.
This room (below) holds the filter. Every thing is filtered. The excess stuff filtered out is sold as fertilizer and the actual paper filters are burned for clean energy somehow (and they leave no ash).
This is the shipping hall.
And one of the many trucks (notice the top of the truck says "Jesus lives").
Then we were all taken into the hall for more beer and a hot meal of Fleischkäse, potatoes and bread. It was yummy but we forgot to make a photo of the food. We were allowed to taste anything we wanted (we had three types of mineral water and a lemon drink from the cooler). The young people in particular enjoyed all the free beer, mostly on tap. They also sold six packs to take home for 3.50 Euros.
A toast!
Almost everyone trying to get a group photo. Amelia took this one with her pano setting while Fredericka was trying to figure out her camera. People in this photo are from all over the world, literally. Every continent, probably. India, Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine, all over Europe, of course, etc.
This was passed around full of beer. It was so heavy Amelia could not lift it. Seriously. Some sort of very old beer stein.
The biggest beer stein in the place!
In 2013, this brewery was awarded the most important prize for small breweries from the German government. It is one of the best family breweries in Germany.
We had a lovely walk home and saw St. Katherine's Church (a sister church to St. Michael's).
And, the required photo of house reflections in the river on a cloudy day as we walk over the Kocher on the Neue Straße bridge.
Other side!
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