Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei

The Wednesday after going to Dusseldorf, we decided to take a trip up to the Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei: the official brewery of the Dortmund Area. This brewery pretty much brews all of the cheapest local beers, so as you might guess, we've gained a fair amount of knowledge about the tastes of these local beers. The beers we've drank of the local beweries are called Dortmunder Kronen, Stifts, Hoevels, and the DAB Beer, all pilsners except for Hoevels, which is an Alt.











We wandered up to the brewery and noticed that it was absolutely huge, probably because it owned all the beers around the region, having bought all of them up throughout the 1900's. However, when we got inside the visitor's welcome center, we noticed that the publicly viewable part of the brewery was very small. There was a small gift shop area in the welcome center, and then a couple rooms that had a lot of artifacts of the brewery's past, but no user-friendly touching type of exhibits. Also, all the exhibits were captioned in German, so we didn't actually understand any of the captions of the exhibits we looked at. We got to look at a lot of cool things though.














In the first room of the brewery, there was a giant container where the Barley was stored and boiled. They were pretty cool, huge and made out of copper. We then wandered around, found a touch-screen interactive computer screen that showed the progression of breweries throughout the 1900's, and how Dortmund arrived at its one, large brewery. Dortmund used to be known for its beers and steel mills, but as the steel industry died down the beer industry kind of died too, and all of the smaller plants were bought by the one big one.














This picture showed the different advertising posters and slogans the company had throughout the years, this one dating to the 80's sometime. They all had some sort of attractive woman somehow accentuating the positive qualities of the beer. Really, very good advertising. we enjoyed ourselves a lot. They had old beer bottles, coasters made throughout the 1900's, and old machines that were some part of the beer brewing process. After getting to look at all of these things, including some statues of people promoting the beer, one of them, the most famous, being King Charlemagne. A very fun trip in all, even if we didn't get to understand or learn a ton, we saw some awesome artifacts and a timeline of the beer industry developing in Dortmund throughout the 20th century.