The Road to Damascus

November 1, 2009 By Dick Cantwell

Incredible as it seems to me now, I didn’t always like beer. I mean, when I was a kid. Once I got into my early teens it wasn’t for lack of trying, and—while a certain amount of discretion is advisable in this era of hyper-correctness—I may as well observe that the landscape of American beer in the early seventies was about as complicated as the one inhabited by Krazy Kat. I remember the fizzy-bitter taste of a purloined Hamm’s, the rapidly flattening mouthfeel of brandless, warm, draft beer at a college kegger, the animal cans of Schmidt.

When I was a senior in high school, I spent a semester in Germany. On my first day there, out for lunch, I exercised my legal right as a sixteen-year-old and ordered a beer. It was a half-liter of Trierer Lowenbrau Edelpils, and while I soldiered through it with my brats or my schnitzel, I really didn’t enjoy it. Not that Rheinland-Pfalz is by anyone’s estimation the cradle of German brewing civilization, but I know the beer was at least decent (I’ve drunk it since, though the brewery, alas, has been closed since 1994). You’ll notice I don’t remember the food.

Still, I was determined. In the weeks that followed I tried other beers available in Trier: Konigsbacher, Karlsberg, Caspary, all German pilsners, and on a trip to Cologne I was unwittingly introduced to Kölsch. The latter I found softer and easier to drink, especially as it was served in those cool little cylindrical glasses, but I still wasn’t there as far as true enjoyment was concerned.

My awakening began with a combination called a “schuss,” which was recommended to me by other students in the group my dad (a German professor) was shepherding, and which consisted of a shot of sweeter dark beer added to the more bitter pils. With my schuss, I was able to keep up, the pen-marks on my coaster marking the gradations that transformed my earlier grimace to a contented (perhaps, possibly, maybe slightly tipsy) smile. No one would have accused me of particular discernment—I drank any schuss going—but compared with the German gymnasium students I occasionally hung around with, who drank their pils mixed with Coca-cola or lemon soda, I was a connoisseur.

Partway through this time, a friend and I made a trip south to Switzerland by way of Freiburg, where we visited an old camp counselor. One of the days we were there, we took a very long walk through the Black Forest, so long, in fact, that we realized at some point that to finish the whole thing on foot would cause us to miss a concert we had tickets for that night (does anybody but me remember Rory Gallagher?).

We emerged from the woods and hitched a ride with an American serviceman, getting back to town with just enough time to have a beer and get a bite to eat. We went to a little café in Freiburg’s main square, right near the Munster, and ordered a beer. Whether it was the thirst engendered by a long day’s physical exertion or the bitter baseline of anxiety about missing the show, something made me order an unadulterated pils, this time a Rothaus Tannenzapfel. It remains one of the best beers I’ve had in my life. It was thirst-quenching and sustaining, simultaneously calming and exhilarating. I was finally able to appreciate the many facets of a wonderful beer; my palate had put aside childish things.

There are those among us who would claim that such moments are what make us brewers. I think this is too convenient, a single-thread narrative as unsophisticated as the “schusses” that helped me to my figurative feet. Still, it’s one among many—the Gouden Carolus at the Snuffle Sleep-in in Bruges, the “Happy Day” in Ullapool, the Sierra Nevada Stout atop Mt. Si—that anchor me in beer culture and its connoisseurship. Literally speaking, the rest is history.