This post is my first contribution to The Session, a beer blog carnival, that is, a monthly beer-themed blog-off. It was conceived by Stan Hieronymus in January of last year and has since grown to quite the event. I’m happy to throw my hat in the ring. The roundup is available here.
The topic of this session, as today is its 75th anniversary, is the repeal of Prohibition. It is, ironically enough, hosted over at the blog of the 21st Amendment Brewery.
On 5 December, 1933, state conventions in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah made the final push and voted for ratification. Only the day before it had been rejected in South Carolina. I imagine most everyone was paying attention only to the first section: “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.” Finally Prohibition, with its attendant violence and organized crime, would be over.
See this is the problem with prohibition (little p). The teetotalers equated alcohol with sin, and thought that by removing alcohol they could cleanse the nation of sin. But people will always do what they do. So under Prohibition (big P) alcohol consumption continued in a big way, after a short decrease, to at least 60% of pre-Prohibition levels. During Prohibition the federal and state governments found themselves spending more and more money in a futile attempt to enforce the law. The handful of agents charged with the task were generally (other than Elliot Ness) corrupt at best, taking bribes to protect drinking establishments, and at worst in the gangs themselves.
In 75 years we seemed not to have learned our lesson. It is not in the place of government to legislate morality. We can draw a direct parallel with drug prohibition (which now is essentially international) or the prohibition of prostitution (which, granted, is not even national). But those are base and obvious. Here is the comparison I would like to make: in 1919, a group of (mainly religious) well-intentioned folk successfully forced everyone to follow their ideas of morality and piety with regard to alcohol consumption. Now eighty-nine years later alot of (I have to assume) well-intentioned folk in Arizona, California, and Florida have forced everyone to accept their ideas of piety in love. I’ll say it just one more time in case you missed it above: it is not the place of government to legislate morality.
Happy Freedom Day!
Dortmund Brewery Museum
Sunday, October 24th, 2010This is the last post I took notes for while in Germany, and it seems an appropriate retrospective. Look forward to my forthcoming first post back in the United States, a cross-section of the newest and weirdest stuff coming out of New Glarus.
It was entirely by accident that I ended up spending the summer in Dortmund, onetime brewery capital of the world. I wasn’t even planning on going abroad, until my German teacher told our class about a summer program through her alma mater, the Technische Universität Dortmund, and I cannot thank her enough for encouraging me to apply.
So perhaps it is appropriate that it was only my very last day in Germany that I finally got around to visiting the Dortmund Brewery Museum.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the international popularity of Dortmund’s stronger version of the originally-southern pale lager, combined with the relative accessibility of its port, caused it to grow into the biggest beer producing city in Germany. Beer and Dortmund were synonymous (and still are, literally, in some parts of the Netherlands). Dortmund had more breweries per capita than anywhere else in the world, an erstwhile Portland.
On an unassuming side street in the north side of Dortmund sits one of the biggest breweries in northeastern Germany, Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei. Walking by it you might not even notice, save the smell of barley in the air.
But there is one welcoming stucco building with large windows on the south end of the complex that was once called the Hansa Brewery, and later the Kronen Brewery. Here is the home of the Brauerei-Museum Dortmund.
The museum is located in a former machine house, so while there are no big tanks or kettles to see, there is a big steam engine, and they’ve moved in a period bottling line as well as one of the original Union delivery trucks.
There is a large collection of memorabilia of the various Dortmund breweries: mugs and glassware, beer mats, bottles, labels, signs, and advertisements. This last bit especially allows the visitor to immerse oneself in another era. There is a fair amount of equipment, and numerous placards that explain the process of the production of beer. Unfortunately the signs are only in German, so an English speaker might wish to arrange for a guide.
The Museum may very well be a bit slanted towards the brands currently owned by the museum’s owner. That point notwithstanding, it provides a valuable look at the history of the beverage that made the city great. It would be all too easy to lose the stories of the people and places that drove Dortmund’s breweries’ growth, and with it the growth of export beer, especially given today’s high-speed merger-happy international beer market. Fortunately the existence of the Dortmund Brewery Museum ensures that won’t happen anytime soon.
A delightful antique. Every day each brewery worker was given a token that this machine would redeem for a free shift drink.
The large, shallow vessel is called a kuhlschip, at one time used to cool hot wort to fermenting temperatures (and it is still used for lambic). The device in back is a convoluted-flow chiller. The hot wort runs back and forth through the tubes, and cold water cascades down the outside.
A photograph of open fermenters at the former Hansa Brewery, proof that even high lager brewers have humble origins.
There is no better brand.
Tags: beer history, Brauerei Museum Dortmund, brewing museum, Dortmund, Dortmund Brewery Museum
Posted in Aus Deutschland, Brewery Visit, Commentary | 5 Comments »