European Brewing Study Tour: Conclusion a.. Belgium is the very definition of European beauty. After touring Hoegarten we planted ourselves in downtown Brussels for the night. The town square is a postcard under evening lighting, home to restaurants and bars by the dozen. The food was the best of the entire 2-week trip, with melt-in-your-mouth mussels and fries that are the stuff of legend. The Grimbergen Dubbel & Trippel were the stand-out beers, showcases of how Belgian brewers are able to hide nearly fatal levels of alcohol in their ultra-smooth ales. b.. We also visited industry suppliers and manufacturers during the tour, including the Ziemann facility in Germany. Ziemann manufactures storage tanks of astonishing dimensions, looking like Saturn V spacecraft on the assemble line. These can measure almost 10 meters across and multiple stories tall. One finished tank was lying on its side, with only a small opening at the top and bottom. I whistled loudly in the open end, and the deafening echo lasted for a full 30 seconds. Cool. c.. At Weyermann malt, the staff treated us to a huge dinner with much fine beer. Afterwards, they took us to their microbrewing facility where they conduct pilot brews. They had created 4 beers that were absolutely identical, except that the type of barley used as the base malt was different in each case. If anyone ever says barley makes little difference in the overall flavor profile, please beat them. Barley matters bigtime. d.. On Friday, we held graduation ceremonies for those on the tour who had completed the WBA Diploma program. Augustiner cask lager (!) was served, with two of the students tapping the keg before venting it, resulting in quite a firehose of beer spraying into the crowd. This resulted in an event that was less a ceremony than a pagan ritual. The keg was drained in less than an hour & a half. Doemens hired a stripper, who was having so much fun speaking Portuguese with our Brasilian students that she stayed through most of the evening. And then the drums came out. Congas, bongos, tambourines… . Nothing is more dangerous or frenzied than 30 brewers hopped up on cask liquor after seeing a naked Brasilian woman gyrate on someone’s lap. The sound generated was one of pending attack, with tribal rhythms and guttural shrieks echoing through the building. The window to our room was opened to the surrounding neighborhood, and I think the only thing that kept the residents from calling the police was the fear of these angry tribesmen spilling into the streets, torching their homes and having liberties with their womenfolk. All ended by about 12:30, with people heading to the train station only to find the night trains had been cancelled due to track repair. We were left to find taxis, which delivered us through the Munich snowfall to our hotels, where we prepared for the ungodly flights returning us to our homes at the crack of dawn on the following day. Recovery has been swift, thanks to the sun & sea of Waikiki. Hope all of you have a good Christmas. Aloha. Keith “Bignose” Lemcke CAMRA BC, Chicago Beer Society, Siebel Institute of Technology, Proud Drunkard