BVT and Kitzmann brew jubilee beer together
The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg celebrates the 275th anniversary of her foundation in 2018. As brewing and the consumption of beer, preferentially in so-called beer gardens or on beer cellars, has a long standing tradition, the idea suggests itself to celebrate this special year with a special beer edition. Being bioengineers, beer has our full interest, since brewing might be one of the initial biotechnological processes. Fortunately, this process results in a fine, nutritious and refreshing food, which supports social events substantially, thus being an ideal base for jubilee events. And since our institute offers a practical course of brewing for our students, to demonstrate application of biotechnological science in everyday life, we decided to brew a special beer for the university celebrations. The university’s leadership happily agreed. What we could not foresee and what might be considered to be the accolade for the BVT brewing team (Lisa Jordan, Ludwig Körber, Stefan Ringgeler, Josephine Taucher, Julian Thünnesen, Konstantin Präbst, Hannes Engelhardt) was the interest of the local traditional brewery Kitzmann. With the help of this professional brewery our institute could provide 180 hectoliters of a celebration beer edition, technical speaking a profund upscaling process. This special recipe has been developed by Lisa Jordan and turned out be the most successful from a selection of several ones. It is a lager with an exclusive hop from New Zealand, admittedly not consequently franconian, but the result counts. By the way, we carried out the brewing of the trial volumes in our new 50 L reactors, which have been financed by our department CBI – obviously this purchase already prove itself. Apparently, a beer needs a telling name, so we called it Helles Köpfchen, i.e. bright head or intelligent fellow. This name is meant to be program, indicating the type of beer and concomitantly its academic background. It becomes evident that the bioengineering study is far from beeing exclusivle dry and theoretical. Cheers to all jubilarians.