Back to memory lane, here's one of the row homes my great-great grandfather built in Valby.
And here's the flower shop where they bought flowers for their wedding. Still kicking after 43 years. Flowers are a huge business in Denmark. You never show up anywhere without them.
This whole area was farmland when my mormor and morfar were born in the early 1900s. Here's one of the family homes about two streets up from Jesuskirken. I have foggy memories of being inside this house when more of my mother's aunts and uncles were alive, but the family sold it 20-odd years ago now. Before the yellow house, there was a family farmhouse on this land that burned to the ground.
Another part of this neighborhood is the Carlsberg Brewery.
The tour used to be 2 hours long and awesome. They recently changed it to a self-guided walk through the history of beer in Denmark. That means that "touring" the brewery is nowhere near as cool as it used to be. You don't see the working brewery because they confine you to a little museum area. That's a shame, but there are still draft horses, the world's largest bottle collection (pictured below), a retrospective on Danish beermaking and a tasting room at the end, where I tried one of the Carl's Specials and the newly released Tuborg Julebryg (Christmas beer).
I have a compulsive museum-placard-reading issue, so it took a while to get through the beer retrospective exhibit. A lot of reading. The main message: Denmark loves beer. You never know how much beer-related information to trust at a beer museum, but qualitative research confirms that Danes drink a lot of beer. The exhibit says there was even a "Great Nordic Inebriation" period in the 1600s when beer took the place of water. There were reports of beer shortages when children were "wasting away" on tea. When the Carlsberg Brewery began to thrive, workers enjoyed a patriarchal business model that provided healthcare, behavior guidelines and a 4-gallon-a-day beer ration to each employee. Four gallons a day.
Originally, Danes drank top-fermented stuff. I'm not a huge expert, but top-fermenting yeast seems to be popular with craft brewers in the States; it adds a complex, fruity dimension to beer. Yet, Europeans were going nuts for bottom-fermented beer. When the Danes couldn't create a bottom-fermenting yeast formula that worked, they took a trip to Munich. My Morfar once told my dad a story about this trip: Morfar said that during the tour of the Munich brewery, Jacobsen carried an open-ended cane, which he stuck into the yeast when no one was looking. He carried the sample back to Denmark (the museum said he used a hatbox; they could both be right), and after that, the Carlsberg brewery was able to master the bottom-fermenting, "Bavarian style" beer.
By the way, I always thought the brewery was named after the last name of the founder, but Jacobsen named it after his son, Carl, and added the word "Berg," which means hill, after the place where his first brewery was situated.
The exhibit also describes how taxation issues in the early 1900s helped solidify Bavarian-style beer's status in Danish society. A big tax was added to beer, and it looked like beer would tank, but then a much, much bigger tax was added to spirits. The Danes liked to chase their aquavit (strong, caraway seed spirits) with light, top-fermented beer, but after taxes increased the cost of spirits twelve-fold, Danes ditched liquor and turned to the stronger Bavarian-style beer to cure what ailed them.
I liked the below part of the exhibit for two reasons: 1. it depicts an interesting marketing campaign from WWII applauding the nutritive features of beer. This was an effort to get some of the nation's barley ration allotted to beermaking.
2. This part of the exhibit connected to the Danish Resistance Museum with the mention of a beer crate used to hide explosives that blew up the "Forum" (gotta ask my mom what the Forum is, or was). The exhibit surmises that because a beer crate was used in the Forum attack, a reprisal attack was staged a year and a half later. They blew up part of the Tuborg brewery, and Carlsberg brewed several months worth of beer for Tuborg to their specifications to keep them going.
Another big part of this brewery, literally: the elephants.
Here you can see the swastika again.
And here I am with one for scale:
On our way to catch Bus #6 into central downtown, we passed this housing--it's workforce housing! Looks like these units may have been gentrified. Much of Valby is actually high-density urban housing. Of interest to someone who works for Socialserve.com.
