Schneider Weisse is a family brewery that began in München in 1872, with Georg Schneider the first. These days Georg Schneider the sixth holds sway in Kelheim. I have a soft spot for family breweries like Bavaria and Schneider. The interesting part about Schneider is that they hold their fans in special regard. They even have dedicated fanclubs all over the world which they support and every year there’s a n international fanclubtreffen. This year the treffen was in Eindhoven, organised by the Eindhovense fanclub, lead by Joyce Maas and Dennis Kort. And the Schneiders were dabei.
The treffen lasted four days, from Thursday to Sunday and consisted of all kinds of awesome beery activities. Chapeau for the sublime organisation! There were some wholesome Dutch things like Oudhollandsche Spelletjes (games like shuffle board, although most people ended up playing Perudo instead), typical Eindhoven things like a pub crawl over Stratumseind, visits to the Philips museum, the Philips stadion, the Stadsbrouwerij and Strijp-S and also Bavarian things like a weisswurst breakfast on Sunday and a party in Trachten on Friday. On Friday morning (and I mean early morning) there were two tours through Eindhoven.
A tour through Eindhoven. So of course the Eindhovense fanclub managed to snare me into organising a scavenger hunt or Schnitzeljagd through the city for Friday morning as the long tour option. Which is all in good fun of course 🙂 I love organising scavenger hunts and use them to educate the participants a bit about the history of Eindhoven and in this case also the beer history of Eindhoven.
We had 28 participants in 4 teams for this tour which had to start at the Drinkers Pub and end in the Stadswandelpark. The tour consisted of riddles like:
Look at Van Moll then look at your right. Somewhere in the next 25 meters there’s a building that used to be part of a brewery called Het Hert (the deer brewery). You can still recognize the building thanks to deery ornaments. Can you find the building and tell us what organisation is in it today?
Bierdame and Tastewise
And puzzles like:
But then everything had to be in German of course! Which was hard, but doable. The fun thing about organising these kind of tours is that you look to your city through different eyes. You notice there are still a lot of historic buildings between all the modern stuff. There are still recognizable references to what was in certain buildings before (I cannot unsee the deer brewery now and I wonder why I never saw it before, having lived here for most of my life). A lot of locations were visited, like de Bierbrigadier (who was so nice to help us with the hunt and who is also a big Schneider Weisse fan), Van Moll, de Stadsbrouwerij, de Bierprofessor, DAF-museum (which used to be a brewery as well) and a lot of old locations where breweries and important things for Eindhoven used to be.
The participants really liked the tour as well, although they were dead tired by the time we arrived at the lunch location (although, to be fair, some beers were involved as well).
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to visit the big Trachten party that night, where even Georg Schneider VI had joined us in our festivities. I also didn’t make it to the morning program of the Saturday and Sunday, but were able to take some pictures of the Biergarten that was created at the Ketelhuisplein, which you can see below! (Also some pictures of the party, taken by other fanclub members). All in all, it were an awesome four days, and I would happily do it again, especially some time again when I’m in better health and able to participate some more 😉
Did you know breweries like Schneider Weisse have such dedicate fanclubs? And now you know, would you join one?
