Beer in Bavaria: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly...The Good?

The Good

In Bavaria, beer is classified as food and not an alcoholic drink. Therefore, wherever food is allowed, beer is too. Drink anywhere you like at any time. No worries Mate! Beer comes in bottles no smaller than 17 ounces. On the bottles themselves, you can usually see a light ring of paper and glue from a previous label, indicating bottles are recycled quite regularly. Hooray for the Germans for being both bigger drunks and better environmentalists than the Americans.

Beer gardens during the summer can be idyllic and a perfect setting for making new friends. (The Dutch model works quite well too: make bars so small that you can’t help but talk to strangers.) In my experience in Europe, sitting with and talking to strangers is perfectly acceptable. Social barriers here are a mere gate latch, compared to the concrete and barbed walls sometimes encountered in the US. I acknowledge, though, some special treatment being a foreigner.

The Bad

In Munich at least, importing beers seems to be a (smirk) foreign concept. I have had many a blank stare when indicated my occasional want for a Belgium spiced ale or an American IPA. The attitude seems to be: We have the best beer, why would anyone want to drink anything else? But it cuts deeper than that. Even some of my regional favorites like Ayinger (brewed a mere 40 km from Munich) can be difficult to find and most of the great monastery brews are simply not found outside their small towns. A great pity.

Worse yet, most restaurants and bars are sponsored by a particular brewery (think Pepsi/Coke) and thus only serve beer from that particular brewery.

Copenhagen, a smaller and some ways more provincial city compared to Munich, had wonderful specialty beer shops, bars, and blooming micro brew scene. All absent in Munich. Which leads me to…

The Ugly

Bavaria has a narrow range of available styles on offer despite its hundreds of breweries (around 600). They are: Pilz, Helles (a light, delicate lager), Dunkles (darker in color and sweeter than Helles), Hefeweizen, and Dunkelweizen. That’s it, or at least 95 percent of what is reasonably available all year round. There is one brew pub (a micro brewery with a restaurant) in all of Munich. It brews a Hefeweizen and a Dunkelweizen.

Although “in Belgium, 70% of the market may be boring pils, a large part of the remaining 30% consists of natural, bottle-conditioned beers. Serious beers have a significant share.” Beeref. And those beers are exported to most of the Western world. Germany has many interesting beers, but as I mentioned earlier, they are quite difficult to find.

Is there any rational explanation as to why Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Madrid, Spain; or Milan, Italy has a great micro-brew scene and access to Belgian beers and Bavaria does not?

German consumers are a partial explanation:

A survey in 2006 of 500 drinkers from all over Germany by the Linzer Market-Institut (Brauwelt 2007, Issue 3, page 44) found that 50% had only bought one brand of beer in the last 3 months. Amongst the remaining 50%, the majority had not bought more than three. While 60% of drinkers limited themselves to drinking only Pils, 21% had never even tried it. For other mainstream styles the results were even worse: 36% had never drunk Hefeweizen, 44% no Schwarzbier and 65% no Kölsch. More exotic styles such as Rauchbier or even Bock were virtually unknown. Beeref.

The German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) also didn’t help cultivating an open and experimental brewing culture. Originally enacted in Bavaria to prevent grains better suited for bread to be used for brewing, it all but decimated the diverse beers of northern Germany (similar to the spiced and fruit beers found in Belgium) when the Reinheitsgebot was extended to cover the whole of Germany as a part of German unification. Beeref. The law does not allow a brewere to name a beverage beer unless is only contains water, hops, barley, and yeast. To date, it is my understanding that the law sill allows other types of beer to be brewed (but it did not in the past), but prevents it to be labled beer. More research is needed.

The Good?

Maybe there is a more inspirational explanation. Is it that the Germans don’t care or they care about other things? A good beer garden experience needs only a few decent to good beers. Old stand-bys. The same goes for the most famous beer festival in the world. With my most rosy of rose-tinted glasses on, I suspect another factor is that German beer culture centers around more the company of others and solidarity than a consumeristic bent demanding 99 flavors from around the globe. But, hey, would it hurt to open up a little?

P.S.: The above critique is in a style named, "love sandwich," which supposedly is an effective way to write a critique for co-workers, etc... without hurting anyone's feelings. Good, Bad, Good = Love Sandwich.