Gott Gebe Gluck Und Segen Drein (God Bless this Bier)

Walking through the streets of Munich when it’s 90 degrees outside is exhausting. Add two walking tours of BMW’s Research and Development department and the city center of Marienplatz, and you’re in for a very long day. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited our group was for the third and final tour of the day. Tonight we visited the Spaten/Franziskaner/Lowenbrau brewery, and it was worth all the walking. As soon as we entered the brewery video room, we felt the familiar breeze of something we had only dreamed about since arriving in Germany, air conditioning! We enjoyed the cool room, while our tour guide Ollie showed us a video detailing the history of the brewery, and how it is now a combination of three separate breweries that have been in Munich since the 1300’s. After the video, Ollie brought us to the old Spaten brew-house, and explained in detail how bier is made in Germany according to the Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian Purity Law). In Germany, bier can only be made with four ingredients: water, hops, yeast, and grain. After looking inside the old vats they used to make Spaten bier, Ollie taught us more about the history of German brew masters.

Germany’s bier tradition started because water at the time was unsafe to drink and fermented beverages like bier were less risky. We continued the tour down below the streets of Munich and into the cellars, where we walked between hundred-year-old barrels that held anywhere from 5,000 to 10,400 liters of bier. Nine of us managed to climb inside one of the smaller barrels, which may give you an idea of just how big they were. From the cellars, we moved back above street level and across the street to the bottling facility. Thousands of recycled bottles moved quickly along conveyer belts throughout the large warehouse. Each bottle was cleaned inside and out, checked for cracks and leftover cleaning fluid, filled with bier, and then sealed and labeled along the same track. It was an impressive sight, to say the least. I left the tour with a much better understanding of how bier is made and the history behind it, and I think it will help me appreciate the historic drink even more.