Craftival

Yesterday afternoon Red Baron visited Freiburg's first Craftival beer fest. The temperature was 32ºC (90ºF), and I had thought that not too many people would show up. I was mistaken, for the site was overcrowded. The possible reason was that while the entrance fee was only two euros, you could buy a beer menu for an additional two euros. This menu gave you the right to taste the beers of nine craft breweries. As my beer menu shows, I visited all the breweries' booths and tasted their beers.

I started with my friends from Braukollektiv and had their by now well-known Black Sheep Ipa:

I continued at Decker's with their Banana Joe Weizen:

I followed with the smile and the taste of Hopfengut No 20 – SUD EINS:

I only had a sip of FOX-Reynaert Tripel Blond strong beer:

I spoke French with the guy from Bendorf who served me their Neudorf Red Ale:

Schwarzwald Gold suggested tasting their VIF, a slightly sour wheat beer, but instead, I wanted to try out their Coco d'Or, which is what they call the other kind of beer. However, their Perlweizen (sparkling wheat beer) was not on the tasting menu. So I paid for the beer champagne served in an appropriate glass.

No wonder I ended up with two glasses in my hands, looking for a seat:

The longest queue was in front of the Bîrtel booth. Everybody wanted to try their lorke beer, based not on thin coffee but on black tea. It is strange how the Swiss use the "Prussian" word for lean coffee.

I learned the word Lorke from my father, who often said when we had coffee in a restaurant: This coffee tastes like Lorke, meaning that what we were drinking did not taste like coffee. Looking into the matter more closely, I discovered that the word is a malapropism of l'orge (French for barley).

The word Lorke was possibly coined in Berlin in the early 19th century during the Napoleonic occupation. With Napoleon's economic blockade of the European continent, even the French occupants suffered from the lack of imported coffee. All sorts of ersatz were brewed based on, e.g., roasted acorns and barley. Note that we have come full circle with roasted barley being the base of beer brewing.

I finished my tour at the combined booth of Martin's* Bräu and Kleines Bierhaus. While I tried the Martinsbräu Chocolate Malt Porter ...
*Read my blog about the German form of the grocer's apostrophe

... the small Schwanauer brewery offered its Weizenbier:

Since the site of the Craftival was not reachable by streetcar, at the end of the day, Red Baron had beaten all records: During the day, I had walked 6.6 km, burned 508 of a planned 350 kcal, and exercised 35 of 30 minutes, whatever that means.
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