Miller Time

After that heat spell of a few days ago, it went from 72 on Tuesday to 52 on Wednesday, and I'm definitely ready for the cool weather. The new module on Packaging and Processing Technology is really interesting and informative, but the information tends to be very macrocentic, reinforcing my desire to avoid working in a large brewing operation.
The Miller Brewery in Milwaukee was indeed impressive, from the automated systems that they wouldn't let me take a picture of all the way to their vintage mash and lauter tuns. While they used to use corn grits for the majority of their fermentible sugars, they now use corn syrup that is added after the boil, making their barley mashes relatively small considering their production size. Their packaging lines were the most impressive part of the tour, stretching over multiple levels and encompassing more packaging types than any brewery I have ever seen. While I don't see myself working in a brewery of that size, I still enjoyed the experience of seeing the entire process of how such massive quantities of beer are brewed and packaged.
On the way back from Milwaukee, we stopped at a store called the Cheese Castle, and I had the good fortune of purchasing a bag of smoked string cheese, which I still am enjoying two days later. I tried some Sprecher Black Bavarian Lager, and it went great with the cheese on the bus trip back.
While the last two weeks had made me a bit nervous about securing accommodations for my three week stay in Munich, I was fortunate enough to find another classmate who is renting a five bed condo and only had three others signed on so far. Staying in a hostel would have been a unique experience, but having access to a kitchen to cook my own meals once in a while will definitely cut down on costs in the larger sense, and give me a reason to splurge on beer.
My biggest personal accomplishment of the week in a practical sense was making a keg tap out of a CO2 manifold. While my buddy had brewed some amber ale two weeks ago and force carbonated it in a five gallon corny keg last night, he forgot his picnic tap in Milwaukee and we were resigned to buying one at one of the two understocked and overpriced homebrew stores in the area. He had a beer-side ball lock hooked to the manifold from the last time that he had a carbonation stone hooked up to that side, and I somehow figured out that we could use the extra ball lock valve on the side of the manifold as a makeshift tap. I don't know what thought process led to my conceptualizing of that idea, but the beer tasted good and had a light carbonation level similar to a real ale.