Yes, you’re correct, your browser did not load a webpage of some always-disappointing website, but the (old) website of your beloved association T.F.V. ‘Professor Francken’.. It does work after all on smart people: clickbait. But since we have no commercial interest and don’t want to sell a pig in the bag, or more appropriate: white wine in a beer bottle, i’d still like to tell you something about those eight signs, the letters: B,r,o,u,w,c,i and e.

The board asked us, the Brouwcie, if we would like to write a blog about ‘something with brewing’ and therefore we decided to give you guys a sneak peek in our brewkitchen.

Kitchen you say? Yes kitchen! Since 2016 the Brouwcie has obtained a nice kitchen on the south side of our city. After more than a year of brewing at the zuiderdiep, b’vo for Camiel, it was time to see whether we are able to repeat our trick in a different environment. And it turned: we couldn’t, or well.. at the moment we are well on our way to produce a drinkable product with a pH higher than 4, but this took us while. The question obviously rising is: why did this take so long? The situation is comparable to when you used to had the dream to play some games with your friends/brother(s) over a LAN-network. You had bought Age of Empires 1 and installed it on one of your computers, the game worked as it was supposed to and now it was time to start with installing it on another computer. You jammed the disc into pc #2 and repeated the same stuff as you had done on pc #1. After two hours of hearing your Pentium 1 pc trying to make coffee(for freshman who never had this experience: you can play with the ancient machines during Physics lab 3 and/or 4), it was finally time to launch the game.

Now trouble started, either the game didn’t work on pc #2 or the one couldn’t find the other on the local area network, even sometimes everything worked except for pushing the button ‘start game’. Besides the previously mentioned reasons, there were another dozen or so which all ruined your wednesday afternoon. I am not quite sure if people were more patient 10+ years ago or we just had more time being in primary school, but i’ve spend more time trying to fix these problems than most people study in a year. The methods we tried differed from installing some obscure patches to changing your Windows Service Pack, to simply trying to start the game with copied discs.

Ok, back to the brouwcie analogy… After us moving to our new brewkitchen, we had these same obscure errors in our brewing process: no fermentation, partial fermentation, weird fermentation, sour beer, very sour beer, battery pack beer, barley wine and some other minor issues. How these problem arose to us was (and partially is) very unclear. Combining these issues with the slow feedback time we have before we can adjust our process, about two months, this resulted in a small delay in our production process. Luckily we have a pretty good overview now of all issues and most of them are resolved.

Now you’re almost done reading and you are realising that your scrollbar is reaching the end of the page, you are realizing that you still have no idea how brewing exactly works. However what you do know, is what one of our brewing evenings is like. It is “something with brewing”, but mostly consists of people blathering all sorts of metaphors and analogies that don’t make any sense. If you’re however still interested in the brewing process, don’t be sad. The brouwcie will, if it’s ok with the board, organize a beer tasting session this year (calender year). At this session we will tell all tips and tricks about brewing. Would you like te stay up to date of this event, send an email with: “Yes, please” to bierproeverij@gebouw13.com after the first of may and we’ll keep you up-to-date