casting out - a flick of the hand that sends
the culprit ignominiously tumbling down
a bottomless chute - any bottle that fails to
meet requirements. Is it imagination, or
are the standards of his unblinking eye
even more exacting than those of the
machine? How long does it take, one
wonders, to acquire this seemingly
superhuman perception that never misses
the slightest blemish in bottles that to the
untrained eye are quite indistinguishable
from the rest?
From that point on, away from the heat of
the furnaces and the impersonal robot-like
movements of the dropping and forming
machinery, the production process sheds
much of its awesome quality. The long,
apparently nonstop lines evoke memories
of Den Bosch or Zoeterwoude. The
resemblance is strengthened by the sight
of a host of characteristic Heineken green
bottles - in this case the EB8 type
produced exclusively for the US. Steadily
they wind their way on the first stage of a
journey that is going to take them
thousands of miles by land and sea before
they are opened by a bartender in another
country to delight first the eye and then the
palate of a thirsty customer.
It is at this point that a slight dryness in the
throat - nothing emotional, just a
nostalgic reaction of the taste-buds -
reminds one of the phase that sub
consciously one misses here, the filling
and capping process of the Heineken
breweries!
Pride in quality!
EB8 is in fact not the only Heineken bottle
produced at Gerresheim; at other times
one might see long lines of 33 cl green
bottles or of the 30 cl brown variety for the
Dutch market. And all - all that reach the
customer at least - are of a quality of
which Gerresheimer executives are justly
proud, a standard which is the ultimate
possible to recall all these various phases
as part of an orderly sequence, but one
which transcends the neat graphics of the
printed page to form a phantasmic
experience in which the dominant im
pressions are unrelenting speed, control
led heat of almost unimaginable intensity,
unerring precision and a mind-bending
volume and variety of units.
The images that persist are of a furnace
glowing with heat so great that the eye can
view the interior only through a specially
darkened glass; viewed on a closed circuit
TV monitor screen in the control room the
flames are seen sweeping across the
chamber first from one side, then the
other; a mix of materials moves slowly on
its way to the furnace, then emerges like
molten lava to be led to the drop moulds;
twin globules of brightly glowing mixture
fall to the blowing apparatus of each
machine, where they are seized by metal
clamps, blown, moulded, their necks
stamped, seized again and transferred to
the conveyor belt to be taken to the cooling
oven; on the neighbouring line of
machines, globules of a different size fall
at a slightly slower pace to be blown and
moulded into bottles of a different shape,
and on the next line the molten glass falls
at yet another tempo and is swiftly trans
formed into yet another shapethen the long
lines of cooled bottles move with a docile
dignity to the quality control area where
they circle briefly for inspection while
apathetic metal arms strike unerringly to
reject any bottle found wanting in
accuracy of dimensions or having the
slightest imperfection of shape or texture.
Superhuman perception
Surrounded on all sides by such an uncanny
degree of automation it is almost a relief to
see a man, substituting for an inspection
machine temporarily out of service,
intently watching the moving line and
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