Wolfgang Kunze

Wolfgang Kunze (born August 7, 1926 in Dresden ; † January 17, 2016 ) was a German brewing scientist.

Life

Kunze's father Max Hermann Kunze (born July 3, 1878) came from a middle-class family with a peasant past and took over the management of the Reichsbank branch in Pirna . His grandfather had made it to the position of superintendent in the royal green vault and had thereby become a royal court official. Mother Else (born March 22, 1881) was the fourth of six children from a farm in Fördergersdorf near Tharandt, thanks to a generous aunt who was largely related to the Kunzes, she grew up in Dresden and received a good education. The parents married on September 12, 1922 in Pirna. In 1932 they bought a piece of land as a retirement home in Radebeul , where the family lived from 1937.

During the Second World War , Kunze was first active in the naval Hitler Youth , completed a sailing course in Prien am Chiemsee in the spring of 1943 and then volunteered as a sea officer applicant for the navy . In February 1945 Kunze was ordered to Stralsund, only to be sent to a seminar at the barrage weapons school in Sonderborg in Denmark. The course was broken off, however, in order to send the course participants ashore for frontline work. At the end of the war, Kunze was disarmed at the ferry from Korsör and ended up in a British POW camp, from which he was released on July 1, 1945. In a special course for returnees, he caught up with the Abitur. In 1946 Kunze and his girlfriend became a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which provided the mayor of Radebeul until 1989.

From 1947 to 1949 Kunze learned the trade of brewer and maltster in the Waldschlößchen brewery in Dresden; He then began studying brewery technology with Paul Kolbach at VLB Berlin , which he successfully completed in 1952 as a brewery engineer. He then spent 38 years in Dresden as a teacher and head of the “Brewing and Malting Branch” of the municipal vocational school. In addition, he also took over the teaching of brewery technology at the engineering school for the food industry in Dippoldiswalde and at the Technical University of Dresden.

In 1959 there was a request from the Volk und Wissen publishing house to develop an official textbook for the training of brewers in the GDR. This resulted in his work “Technologie Brauer und Mälzer” in 1961, which saw six editions in the GDR, but also became very popular with brewer trainees in West Germany.

In 1990 Kunze was replaced as head of the Dresden Brewery School. From 1991 it became the "VLB Dresden branch". At the same time, VLB took over the publishing rights for the textbook “Technologie Brauer und Mälzer”, later followed by international editions in English (1996), Chinese (1998), Polish (1999), Russian (2001) and Spanish (2006). With more than 60,000 printed copies in 7 languages, his work is one of the most successful brewery books in the world.

Honors

• Honorary member of the VLB Berlin (2001)
• Honorary member of the German Brewmaster and Malzmeister Association (2001)
• Honorary member of the Saxon Brewers' Association (2006)
• Bearer of the Bavarian Order of Beer (2008)
• Winner of the golden badge of honor of the VLB Berlin (2015)
• Memorial plaque in the school center for agriculture and nutrition in Dresden

Fonts (selection)

• Technology for brewers and maltsters. VEB Fachbuchverlag: Leipzig 1962
• Qualification material for bottle cellar workers. VEB Fachbuchverlag: Leipzig 1967
• Development of the brewing industry in the new federal states and Berlin. Westkreuz-Verlag: Berlin / Bonn 1996
• Development of the brewing industry in the new federal states and Berlin from 1989 to 1998. Westkreuz-Verlag: Berlin / Bonn 1999
• Development of the brewing industry in the new federal states and Berlin from 1999 to 2000. Westkreuz-Verlag: Berlin / Bonn 2001

Web links

• Obituary of the VLB

Individual evidence

1. ↑ https://www.vlb-berlin.org/kunze
2. ↑ Brewery Forum, October 2017, p. 25