Visit a beer museum
You could easily plan a German vacation that featured a different beer museum every day. One of the best is the Bavarian Brewery Museum, which operates in parallel (separate admission for each) with the Bavarian Bakery Museum in Kulmbach, nicely establishing a grainy link between bread and beer. Neither limits itself to German history nor over romanticizes the business of brewing or baking, and visitors leave with a realistic sense of the often hard life laborer in those two industries led. A quick warning: the informative displays are captioned only in German so if you don’t speak the language, sign up for a tour given by an English-speaking guide.
Get in the Christmas spirit
German Christmas markets feature plenty of drinking, but not beer. The drink of choice is Glühwein, basically a mulled wine, or some other warm drink mixed with spirits. Tourists from around the world travel to shop at these markets, although we found local food specialties as much of an attraction as anything on sale. Berlin alone has 50 different markets, and one of the dozens of markets in Munich is held on the Theresienwiese, home to Oktoberfest.
Dresden, where the Weihnachtsmarkt began in 1628, also features a particularly intriguing medieval-themed market. And in Nürnberg we were reminded that in Germany beer to remember is always close by. A five-minute walk from the Christkindlesmarkt we warmed ourselves at Hütt’n, a restaurant specializing in Franconian dishes and beer brewed in nearby small breweries, many of them brands we never expect to see again.
Discover Zoigl
Squint hard in the Schalander, the traditional break room, in the community brewhouse in Neuhaus and you’d swear you could see the spirits of brewers from hundreds of years ago mingling with the current keepers of Zoigl beer. Such is the dichotomy of Zoigl, steeped in tradition seit 1415 but so fashionable that a schedule of when and where to find the rare unfiltered lagers is posted on the Internet.
Zoigl beers, unique to the Oberflaz region of Bavaria located between Bamberg and the Czech border, come from a community brewhouse. The right to take beer home to complete fermentation and lagering belongs to individuals living in particular houses with brewing rights. They serve those beers in a pub that’s part of the house, most operating one weekend a month. When a pub is open the owner hangs a sign–a Brauerstern (Brewer’s Star)–outside the door, Zoigl meaning sign in the local dialect.
Only five Zoigl community breweries remain–there were as many as 75 in the nineteenth century–in the towns of Windischeschenbach, Neuhaus, Mitterteich, Eslarn and Falkenberg, with most of the pubs in the first two towns. Because the pubs don’t keep regular hours Zoigl beers have long been something of a white buffalo for beer hunters. This changed recently when brewers in Windischeschenbach and Neuhaus began posting their serving schedule on the Internet. They won’t be the only places in the region to find Zoigl beers on any given weekend but this makes it easy to find at least one.
Additionally, beginning in 2007 several pubs decided to open on the same day, October 3, German Reunification Day, the national holiday that commemorates the official unification of East and West Germany in 1990.
“People are always looking for something to do,” Johannes Zange, a university student who works part-time at Schafferhof-Zoigl told us as he filled half-liter glasses decorated with the Zoigl symbol. “We decided to give them something useful.” This was one of the few times all day we heard English, and on every occasion it was to speak with us. By noon the multiple rooms of Schafferhof were full, a combination of older citizens dressed in traditional garb and families with children in hand. Here you don’t feel you are drinking beer in somebody’s house pub. The renovated complex of stone buildings includes a stage where internationally known blues bands sometimes perform.
At Schafferhof we picked up cards to be stamped at each of the seven Neuahus locations serving Zoigl that day (there were more in Windischeschenbach). After visiting all seven you were to turn in your ticket to be entered in a drawing for various prizes, one of which was a pig. We didn’t make the full circuit, but confirmed by the second stop that, intended or not, each of the house breweries adds its own character to the beer.
The community brewhouse itself is located in what looks like a small barn. After mashing, lautering and boiling in a traditional two-vessel system wort is pumped into a shallow open vessel tank on the second floor surprisingly similar to the cool ship at the Cantillon lambic brewery in Brussels. It rests there “for a day or two” before being racked into a small tanker and hauled to the house brewery where it will become beer.
Among our stops was Zum Waldnaabtal, a hotel in the center of the village that regularly serves Zoigl and that had been booked solid for months, indicating growing interest in this celebration. And at Teicher-Zoigl, one of two Zoigl houses run by members of the Punzmann family, I struck up a conversation with a resident of Munich. He and 10 friends had made the journey north by train, planning the trip six months before, not because they are tickers adding to their Beer Life Lists.
They didn’t come only for the beer, he explained, but to enjoy the Oberplaz itself, not the hippest or richest region of the country but one where life moves a little slower and Zoigl fits right in.
“This is what Germany should be, what beer in Germany should be,” he said, looking around a room brimming with beer and conversation.
“This is tradition.”
