Augustiner alcohol free milk

Morning dog walk dodging the showers sent from the UK. Forecast though that it will become another great week by Wednesday. Then to the sawmill in Westerheim, the owner, Max, a charming guy and we had a good chat about matters wood and farming as he is also a small organic dairy farmer. I will deliver my logs in the next few days.

It was our Farmer Franz who had recommended Max and on the way home saw him at work. He has recovered well from his hospital stay and is now slowly beginning to start work. He was on the road outside the farm, directing traffic around a huge articulated truck manoeuvring in to his yard.

The truck was loaded with 25 tonnes of finest Augustiner Brewery draff - the stuff left over after the brewing. Most breweries sell this off, our MrB collects it from a local brewery to make a mix with things like apples and conkers to feed the wild deer in the worst winter months. Franz does the same sort of thing with the feed for his cows, adding the draff to the feed mixing machine.

Normally he orders 12 tonnes which is dumped on a concrete base and he covers it with plastic much like silage. Now he is forced to take a full truckload but they offer a "sausage° making service. The draff is offloaded in to a massive plastic bag, the poor driver having to move the lorry a metre every minute but having to jump down each time to move the floor scraping and filling mechanism. If he unloads on a slight downhill slope, the sausage exuding mechanism pushes the truck forward.

Tasted the stuff - seemed tasteless but not unpleasant, very moist and still warm, Annamarie, the boss on the farm, has even made beerburgers with it. I guess no worse than some other vegetarian foods.

Augustiner is the oldest brewery in Munich and the only major brewery in Munich still in private hands. It's the only beer my father in law will drink. It's also the only brewer on the Oktoberfest which dispenses from wooden kegs and in a "small" tent (8,500 seats) with a homely atmosphere. It is also has the cheapest beer of all the big breweries at the event: 10.40 Euros a litre. Horrendous price but one has to consider the music, building the tents etc etc. In other such events around Munich you get a litre for under 6 Euros.

Well cheers Heidi, Maggie, Getrud, Sieglinde and Co....I suspect you are munching the stuff that all the Italians, Australians etc will be pouring down their throats in less than two weeks - Oktoberfest starts on 17th September (it runs 17 days and ends on first Sunday in October, which explains the Oktober bit - I guess). Perhaps Brexit may mean less UK visitors now that the pound has lost value - however maybe the UK farmers can conversely sell their milk to the mainland for a good price..

This is not a part of Blip just a note to myself: Why oh why is the UK going through all this which despite the first past the post rule, is actually at best a tie. Oh how I wish the vote could be done again with real facts on the table. I don't blame anyone, just yesterday in the former communist state where Merkel comes from, Mecklenburg Vorpommen voted it's state parliament. The biggest losers were the far left, ex Communist party who lost their voters to the far right  AfD (UKIP equivalent), the main reason being "dissatisfaction with the established parties nand the fear of immigration and that in a state with probably the least immigrants. What a crazy world we sometimes see, the only difference here the east German vote is only for 4 years and a coalition of Labour & Conservative still rules the local parliament.