Did a tour of Becks brewery whilst there, and must say at source, their local lager (not exported) is the best I have tasted.
It is called Haake Beck, and uses more hops than their standard Beck's export (all Hallertau apparently).
Just some random pics of the tour, nothing exciting I'm afraid. They actually wouldn't allow pictures to be taken inside the mashing room.
The building with the Becks sign is their grain silo! They refill that once a week
A view of the craft beer headquarters!
An old fermenter.
An old fermentation barrel, or possibly "bright tank"?
They used to employ small kids to climb through to clean out the sludge. They also had to wear a lit candle in case CO2 build up was excessive (yep, if the flame went out, you had seconds to escape before asphyxiating)!
They said it was a little cheaper to use candles, than have to look for new kids to train.
Some bottle designs through the ages. They went into detail about the development of crown caps. Apparently all crown caps should have 21 "tines" now, whereas previously there used to be more (I think 24 or so).
An old bottling machine. The smaller unit behind it was the labelling machine, where one woman would add thousands of labels to each bottle per day.
That should put things into perspective when you next feel the need to moan about "bottling day"
even the regular Becks at source is hop forward!
.
). It was a real eye-opener for me how much light struck beer I've drunk over the years assuming that's how it should taste. For example, pretty much all the Becks we get around here is light struck, so over the years I'd forgotten what real Becks tastes like and, sadly, came to believe that skunky/perfumey character was a trait of Becks.
