As I visited Burton last year with the new students, I visited Dortmund in 2018 with my own study group. Our assignment was to brew a Dortmunder Export, but none of us ever drank a Dortmunder Export before.
When I visited Brussels last year it wasn't specifically for the beery things. The main beery thing of the trip was a Gueuze brewery, namely Cantillon.
I told you about the Dutch championships, well, a week ago I was at the world championships Biersommelier! Dennis Kort, Pepijn van der Waa and Hubert Hecker were the Dutch delegation and Maurus, Uwe, Frans and I joined them as their cheerleaders.
As of last week we are with almost 250 certified biersommeliers in the Netherlands. A week ago Tastewise and I guided a group of biersommeliers through beery Eindhoven.
This post is way overdue, but Eindhoven is my home town, and certainly needs to be here. Besides, Eindhoven has such an interesting beer history!
Burton-on-Trent is historically speaking a very important beer city and it is mainly known for this extensive brewing history, with its height around the 18th and 19th centuries.
Kelheim, Stadt im Fluss, a gorgeous city with a very small but beautiful Altstadt. We went there for the Schneider Weisse starkbierfest, but I will happily come back again for the city itself
Bamberg, the city of rauchbier. But more importantly, the city with probably the biggest specialty malts house over the world. I will come back to malt houses later.
A bit of a side story, but to make the connection to beer: Being a biersommelière is all about taste and flavours, about combining beer with food and such, and you can and should apply this knowledge and skill to other eatable and drinkable things as well.
I haven't got a lot of knowledge about the Austrian beer history yet and I hope to get back to this topic better educated. But for now I'll just share with you our beery adventures in Salzburg.