Bottle your own weisse beer
A collection of old equipment dominates the balcony overlooking the high-tech bottling line at the Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn in Kelheim. Some of these contraptions hold one bottle, others dozens. Most don’t work anymore, but an important one is in working order. At the conclusion of a brewery tour each visitor fills a single bottle with flat beer and flips the top closed. They take it home with instructions about how to complete bottle conditioning so that in two weeks they’ve got a fully carbonated Schneider Weisse Original.
“The idea is to illustrate to tourists how this works,” explained Schneider brewmaster Hans-Peter Drexler. “Nobody understood bottle conditioning.” They likely don’t comprehend the chemistry behind refermentation in the bottle, but can easily appreciate the natural process that gives a beer most Americans call hefeweizen its blossoming white head.
Sleep in a brewery gasthaus
The Private Brauereigasthöfe, an association of more than 60 restaurants and hotels linked to breweries, compiles an annual directory that lists nearly three dozen brewery guest houses with accommodations–and it turns out even more breweries have rooms to let. We stayed at two of them, both with lively restaurant-pubs that double as breakfast rooms in the morning, both run by owner-brewmasters fascinating to listen to.
Private Brauereigasthof Schneider, home to the “Kleines Brauhaus in Altmühltal,” sits hard against cliffs topped with a castle ruin that overlooks the village of Essing and the Altmühltal River. Tourists visit this area southwest of Regensburg for its hiking, cycling and boats trips on the river. In a region thick with larger breweries, small (“kleines”) works fine. Josef Schneider brews beer the same time-consuming way his family has since buying the already historic brewery in 1880.
“Bavarian beer must have more malt flavor,” he said. “You must cook long it to make it that way. Otherwise you have Warsteiner . . . or American beer.”
Bernard Kuhn recently purchased the Weissbräu Freilassing from the rest of his family. Freilassing is located not far from Salzburg and Austria, a short ride on a bus you can catch less than two blocks from the brewery. In his book German Wheat Beers author Eric Warner describes the brewery hotel as “romantic,” with likely the only wood-fired kettles in Germany (Brasserie Caracole in Belgium also uses wood to heat its kettles). You might have to be a brewer to appreciate that bit of romance, but Kuhn’s is the oldest weissbier brewery in the region, opening in 1910 long before wheat beers became fashionable. Wood heating is new; the copper kettles installed in the 1950s were coal-fired into the 1970s.
In this antique brewery, Kuhn brews less than half of what even Josef Schneider makes. “Tradition, of course, but the important thing is to keep the quality,” he said. “You cannot always do the same process. You have to brew good beer out of shitty malt. That’s the skill of the brewmaster.”
Hike up the Holy Mountain
The Holy Mountain looms regally over the Upper Bavaria’s Five Lakes Region, topped by the steeples of the Andechs Monastery, visible from miles in any direction. The hike from the parking lot to the top is steep but short, and there’s refreshment waiting because the fifthteenth century church, with its shiny Rococco interior and many holy relics, isn’t the only draw. Visitors annually drink about two million half-liter mugs of the much-revered Andechs beers in the Bräustüberl and the Klostergasthof.
Hilltop views of Lake Ammersee to the west and the Alps to the south are as good as advertised, each a little different from the various indoor and outdoor seating areas. You’ll also see copper kettles behind glass windows, but they are for decoration. Fewer than ten monks remain at Andechs and they leave brewing to secular workers in a modern facility at the base of the hill.
Check the Reinheitsgebot at the door
Brewers in the Lower Saxony town of Goslar first made a beer called gose long before the Reinheitsgebot, Germany’s beer purity law, was invented. When gose matriculated to Leipzig to become all the rage there, the Reinheitgebot still didn’t apply in northern Germany. So it’s silly to worry that this sour wheat beer violates the rules because it is spiced with coriander and salt. Instead, be amazed it is brewed at all.
Gose was the dominant local style in Leipzig at the beginning of the twentieth century, with an estimated 80 gose houses, called Gosenschenke, serving the beer. Yet by the 1960s not a single brewery made gose and, think about it, how many beers come back from the dead?
Today, two breweries in and near Leipzig make gose, another version is sold in Goslar and several brewers in America have taken a stab at making something they call gose. At Ohne Bedenken, a reborn gose house in Leipzig whose owner led the effort in the 1980s to resurrect the style, we conducted primary research, comparing the two different versions of gose available in city. The average German beer drinker would likely call them sour and sourer. Rittenguts Gose, brewed under contract, might be the more assertive of the two but the gose made at the Bayerischer Bahnhof brewpub is nonetheless decidedly tart and spicy.
“We have people in Leipzig who only drink gose in this pub,” said Banhoff brewmaster Matthias Richter. Bahnhof became a beer destination when the historic train station was turned into a brewery complex in 2000, and gose accounts for about 30 percent of sales. “In Germany, most people drink pilsner. People from other towns will come to try it. They try gose, then go back to pils. People in Germany say you like gose or you don’t like gose.”
At Sifonie, a stylish café where we drank the Rittenguts with lunch, when our server delivered our beers she warned us they would be quite sour and added she’d be happy to turn them into one of the many gose cocktails on the menu. These included blends garnished with syrups also used to dose Berliner weisse, as well as others fortified with sweet liquor. Not sure what the keepers of the Reinheitsgebot would have to say about that.
