Bound for Beer

  This post is part of a 13 part series, if you want to start from the beginning, click here .  Friday in Zoigl County Part 2, including Visiting a Communal Brewhouse, & the Zoigl Beer “Style” Zoigl Trip - Part 8 of 13  We had a little time to settle into our rooms before we were to meet Ferdl at 6pm, for a tour of the Kommunbrauhaus (sometimes translating German into English is easy) in Windischeschenbach.  Ferdl is a lifelong resident of Upper Palatinate (aka Oberpfalz). Rich and Ferdl met when the tours they were each leading crossed paths. Ferdl, now a very vigorous 70something,  did some brewing earlier in life. Ferdl borrowed the brewhouse key from someone in town.  The tour of the communal brewhouse was a true highlight of the trip. Sometimes it really helps to know people who know people who know people. Stepping into the brewhouse was like stepping back in time, while also being firmly in the present, and the future since they don’t fix what a...

  This post is part of a 13 part series, if you want to start from the beginning, click here .  Friday in Oberpfalz Part 1, & the Zoigl Star Zoigl Trip - Part 7 of 13  Finally, after an appetizer of Munich posts, here's what you have (hopefully) been waiting for. Our D-bahn tickets gave us free metro rides in Munich for the day, but Billy and I were up early and had way more than enough time, so we hoofed it to Hauptbahnhof, the central train station.   Being a true professional, Rich had our day fully scheduled out. We arrived early at the platform to get good seats on the Alex RE2 train, which did indeed fill up. We scored a set of four seats facing each other, and the almost two hour ride passed quickly and jollily. We got off at Wiesau, where we were to catch Bus 6276 to Waldhausen. The train and bus schedules were both a little out of whack that day and the station was under construction. After some confusion and running with baggage, we were on the...

  This post is part of a 13 part series, if you want to start from the beginning, click here .  Thursday in Munich Zoigl Trip - Part 6 of 13  The rain returned. We were expecting this, and earlier in the week slotted the Deutsches Museum for this morning. The Deutsches is pretty much Germany’s version of the Smithsonian, except that much of it is in one huge main building, with two other locations around Munich (plus locations in Bonn and Nuremberg).  The Deutsches main location is way too big to cover in one day. They changed the entrance location from when I was there almost 20 years before, so we hit the massive air and space hall first, which I had missed before. Lots of other people made this their rainy day plan too, so it was crowded enough to be a little tight.  After having our fill of the museum, we lazily made our way back to the hotel, checking out Bavarian clothing stores on the way. Lunch was in the Viktualienmarkt, at a random place with an enclo...

This post is part of a 13 part series, if you want to start from the beginning, click here . Wednesday in Munich Zoigl Trip - Part 5 of 13  After a rainy Tuesday, Wednesday was sunny and temperate. I didn’t get to see the BMW Museum on previous visits to Munich, so that was on the agenda. We took the subway there, where Billy, always wanting to practice his German, struck up a conversation with a group of young people doing their public service. The parts I understood were interesting, especially what they knew about Philadelphia. The BMW Museum, which opened in 1972, is a cool bit of architecture. I found the contents very interesting and well laid out. BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavaria Motor Works), and if you want to see motors and their evolution (and I did), this is the place to go.  Besides the Museum and BMW office tower, there is another huge BMW building, The Welt, that we couldn’t figure out . Our confusion was due to The Welt being mostly closed to p...

  Tracy Mulligan Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, the craft beer scene in the Philly metro area was a very tight community. Those were heady times. Craft beer was still a niche. Big money would come barreling in every so often, blunder around and after severe losses, would stagger away, leaving the local craft beer community pretty much still a small friendly world.  One of the fixtures of this community was Tracy Mulligan. With her perpetually perfect hair and make-up, she always looked like she just walked out of a 1980s rock video. While she may have stood out visually from the fairly homogenous crowd back then, she fit right in. Totally free of pretense, she was around for the love of good beer and the comradery that accompanies it.  When she went from being a beer craft civilian to an industry professional, she was a natural. Speaking as a craft beer bar owner from that time, Tracy was a truly great brewery rep. She knew her beer, she always followed through, and ...

This post is part of a 13 part series, if you want to start from the beginning, click here . Tuesday in Munich Zoigl Trip - Part 4 of 13  Billy wanted to get acclimated to the local time before the big Zoigl hike, and I wanted to revisit and/or check out some sights I missed on previous trips, so we arrived in Munich a few days early. The train from the Munich Airport was closed for a few months. After much confusion, we found the bus to Hauptbahnhof. Having had 6 great experiences with the airport train in the past, I wasn’t prepared for this chaos, and it was utter chaos. Eventually we ended up on the right bus. Though having bought transit passes online the week before made getting on the bus easy peasy.  Billy had been to Munich before and wanted to stay close to the Viktualienmarkt, which was a great call. We ended up staying at the Hotel Blauer Bock, which is about a block away.  Blauer Bock Blauer Bock (Blue Goat) is a fine hotel, about a 20 minute walk (no hills) ...