Christmas party: our team celebrated another successful year at the new Hafenbrauerei Finne.

This year, for the first time, we did not celebrate our Christmas Party in the institute but instead, went out, to the newly opened brewery Finne. It is the newest addition to Münster’s “must be” bio-locations at the Harbor’s South Side, right next to the cheese factory Hafenkäserei and the bio-bakery Cibaria. Luckily, the incredible network of our alumna Dr. Anne Vortkamp extends to the Finne founders, and she secured a table for us in time. But before the beer, the God’s in form of our Christmas Elve Cordula Kurth had placed a sweaty Scavenger Hunt: we formed two groups and had to compete in solving a series of tough chores on our three-hour’s walk from the institute across the heavily crowded Christmas Market in Münster’s inner city and to the Harbor. Once there, we did not have to wait long for so many different beers, platters full of tasty starters with delicacies from Münster, then Käsespätzle or Rinderrostbraten and, of course, the traditional Secret Santa Wichteln. We even received a small tour through the brewery – small but impressive! This is always an opportunity to look back gratefully to the year, first and foremost to the students who successfully finished their Bachelor, Master, and doctoral theses in our group – Benjamin Schwirtz, Lea Theile, and award-winning Margareta Hellmann, respectively. Our last projects – Dr. Carolin Richter’s EIP project AbDü on insect chitosan, Dr. Margareta Hellmann’s DFG project Cryptococcus on fungal chitosan, Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr’s and Katharina Eickelpasch’s projects in the framework of the DFG Codeχ Priority Programme to decipher the chito-code, as well as our two start-up projects greEnCAP technologies from Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar and CARAPAX biotechnologies from Dr. Anne Vortkamp, Dr. Philipp Lemke, and Dr. Carolin Richter. Amazing – especially given that our group is winding down. Or is it?