Friday, August 8, 2008

Heineken Brewery Tour: Brew You Ride and Heineken Beer Tasting

Let me highlight the ‘Brew You Ride’ and ‘Heineken Beer Tasting’ we experienced last September at the Heineken Brewery Tour. This is probably the climax of the tour because here we BECOME the beer and we finally get to TASTE the beer behind the visit, even though we’ve probably drank litres and gallons of it already.

Here comes the Brew You Ride. The concept is experiential, it is for the audience (that is me) to BE a beer for a few minutes. So we entered this dimmed studio, that is supposed to be the cistern where we will be brewed =)

We are now inside the cistern, er studio, and we have this big panel screen in front of us and a narrator telling us we are now going to be brewed, step by step. I even felt the studio shake underneath me (that explains why the foto is a bit off!) and water was sprinkled on my face! Cool effects, reminds me of Omniversum in Den Haag and Rialto Theater in Enchanted Kingdom in the Philippines.

Enough of the brewing experience, now the official beer tasting ceremony has began! Give me my beer alstublieft!

She is explaining here why the Dutch cap the froth of the beer (the act of skimming off excess froth with a plastic tool which beer lovers find an abomination) when serving and it has something to do with letting the beer breathe and reach its strength limit or something like that? OK, I admit, I honestly forgot, I was not really listening that well, haha. Shame!

Anywho, it was a very fascinating week of beers because a few days before my visit to Heineken Brewery in Amsterdam, I was at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin as well. I did the self-guided tour, the beer tasting, all the works.

Interested to hear about my final assessment? So which is which? Heineken or Guinness?

*DRUMROLLS* (with splashes of beer in the background)

Answer: Guinness beer of course as I love dark brews but the Heineken Brewery is much, much entertaining and engaging than Guinness Brewery.

More of the Heineken Brewery Tour on my next post.

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