Friday, February 29: Ehingen/Donau
Yesterday: Gasthaus Brauerei Sonne, Herrenzimmern
Konstanz is an old city. It's been a resort since the Roman days, so it never suffered the destruction that many German cities did during the last century. Many ancient buildings remain, but there's plenty of construction going on, too. Much of this new construction is unfortunately covering up the beautiful old architecture, like this new office building being built on Bodanstraße.
The new hides the old in Konstanz
The second train this morning followed the Donau for nearly two hours through some very picturesque country.
A quaint village on the Donau, somewhere between Immendingen and Ehingen
It was raining a bit when I got to Ehingen, but the 500-meter walk to Gasthof-Brauerei Schwanen wasn't too bad. I arrived around 1:15, just in time for some excellent lunchtime Maultäschle.
Gasthof-Brauerei Schwanen, Ehingen/Donau
A real neat feature at Schwanen is their 50-liter portable brewery-on-wheels. They use it to brew their monthly special beer (Fastendoppelbock this month) and they also offer "Bierseminare", at which you can brew a batch of your own beer on the small system.
The 50-liter brewhouse at Schwanen
The 15-hectoliter kettle at Schwanen
They had four beers available this time:
The Schwanen beers
Just on the other side of Ehingen's downtown area is Brauerei Schwert. They didn't look very open when I got there around 2:30 in the afternoon.
Brauerei Schwert, Ehingen/Donau
But open they were: there was one old man drinking a Weissbier, who looked like he hadn't left that very chair since the place was founded 200 years ago. There was an older woman who I understood to be the brewer's mother, who was waiting tables. And Peter the brewer himself showed up shortly. Their dialect was even harder to understand than the guys in Wurmlingen, but here they spoke enough Hochdeutsch that we could converse fairly easily.
Peter pours us a beer
Calandria in the brew kettle
Lager cellar
After Peter showed me around his brewery, I enjoyed their very fine beers:
The Schwert beers
I didn't get to see the malting facilities, but Peter told me that he malts about 100 tonnes of grain every year. Some of the malt he uses himself, and the rest he sells to other Ehingen-area breweries.
Speaking of Ehingen-area breweries, Peter told me that there's a third brewpub in town called "Rößle", and it's not in my database yet. Apparently, it's located not too far from Schwert, but I was already running very late, and I had to start heading back to Konstanz. I'll try to find out exactly where it is so that I can visit it (as well as Berg) next time I'm in the area.
It's hard to get from Ehingen to Konstanz efficiently; this trip took some four hours, with plenty of time to kill at the Ulm station. I killed that time by means of Gold Ochsen Weisse Hefe.
Gold Ochsen Weisse Hefe
Tomorrow: Brauerei zur Krone, Tettnang
0 comments:
Post a Comment