Beer and Robots

Today was a fun day. We woke up early this morning to go visit the BMW production plant, something I had been looking forward to ever since we got the itinerary. The BMW plant was impressive because of the unbelievable amount of automation involved in the production of the cars. In other words, robots do almost all the work at this BMW plant. We learned that this particular production plant is one of the only inter-city plants in the world. Because of its inner-city location, the plant cannot expand its facilities. Therefore, the engineers at this plant had to get really creative with the layout of the plant. This creativity was evident in the way all of the production equipment was arranged in a way that wasted absolutely zero space. I could not help but think back to the robots at Widmere that worked on the kegging line. These robots do work that no human could conceivably do and reduce the amount of error to almost zero.

After our tour of the BMW plant we visited the Ayinger Brewery. Ayinger resembled the BMW plant in the sense that it is one of the only fully-automated breweries in Germany. It is interesting to consider the effect that automation could have on the employment opportunities in the future. It is clear that jobs in manufacturing are going to continue to decline, and we saw some concrete evidence of that today. Ayinger only employs three people to watch over the brewing process. An fun sidenote is that the brewers at Ayinger are constantly in contact with the brewery through their cell phones. If something goes wrong at the brewery, then they get a notification on their phone. The fully-automated brewery was really cool to see, but it was the rest of the experience at Ayinger that captivated me. First of all, Ayinger is an independent, family-owned brewery, which is something that is rare these days in Germany. Second, our tour guide poured us samples of beer straight from the fermentation tanks. This was something that I had never experienced, and I have really been missing out. The beer was their Jahrhundert, which is a medium strength light lager. The beer is normally filtered but the beer straight from the fermentation tank was completely unfiltered. It had a fresh, full taste which was unlike anything I had tasted before. Third, there was awesome beer artwork throughout the brewery. And last but absolutely not least, we got to taste some beers after the tour. Ayinger is definitely a brewery I will support in the future and I will forever dream of my next vacation to Aying to visit the Ayinger brewery.