My Facebook news feed is flooded with the newest, latest craft beer brewery openings. That’s my own doing. I like many of their pages, as I have a voracious appetite, thirst even, to keep up with the scene in London, places I’ve travelled to (Argentina), and places I hope to someday venture to (Peru). It’s encouraging to see a plethora of new small businesses, all run by millennials who are very vocal on social media about their latest brew, tasting event, and collaborations. This so-called golden age of craft beer is very much a recent phenomenon, and it’s hard to remember a time when good beer was hard to find, when you had to trek to the mecca of the Pacific Northwest to find something worth drinking.
With the continuing rise of the craft beer movement and its global spread, it’s easy to dismiss anything that was developed before its popularization. Maybe I’ll start referring to this period as B.C., before Craft? Unfortunately this brings to mind the easy to please varieties such as Amstel, Budweiser, and Stella Artois, but also wrongfully dismisses the likes of Chimay, Duvel, and even the simple pleasures of German weissbiers that have been brewed to perfection for hundreds of years. Just because more people know about good beer these days – its presence in our urban backyards, its distribution in your neighborhood supermarket, its growing audience on social media, doesn’t mean that good beer was nonexistent prior to the boom. It was just unknown to the masses.
I guess in my recent mini break to Munich, my spoiled millennial self was reminded that there are many amazing old school breweries out there, still brewing strong. Not cool by any modern standard, some are actually a few hundred years old and serve food that looks like it came out of a school cafeteria (this is meant as a compliment). There are only a few styles of beers on the menus – the traditional weissbiers of course, but also Dunkels and Hells lagers. While these days breweries in the UK are developing their own styles of American Pale Ales, and American ones have long been experimenting with Saisons and Porters, traditional German beer seems content to stick to its origins.
As my friend and I ventured into Hofbräuhaus on a Saturday evening, I was immediately struck by the smell of beer in the air. While beer is not actually brewed on site, Hofbräuhaus is probably Munich’s most famous bierhall, a large open space flooded with hundreds of picnic tables and booths perfect for groups to congregate over a drink (or many) and a bite to eat. No TV, no queuing at a bar, no nonsense really. With vaulted high ceilings, hundreds of tables, and plenty of servers scrambling around handling liters of beers, it’s nothing like the tiny warehouse holes in the wall that most microbreweries operate out of in Hackney or Brooklyn. It was loud and crowded. There were people in there who weren’t even drinking beer, tourists mainly. Normally this would annoy me but the ambience, oozing a dated charm, won me over.
Hofbräuhaus – from an American’s perspective it evokes an uncomfortable amount of nostalgia for DisneyWorld
A feeling of Old World Europe pervades throughout Hofbräuhaus
My friend and I happily drunk our way through a liter each of their Helles lager, followed by a tall slender pint of golden orange weissbier.
Making my way through a liter of Hofbräu Original, their Helles lager
And what about the cafeteria style food? I ordered the schnitzel which was served with potato salad and topped with a berry compote.
Gotta love the brown food at Hofbräuhaus, mmm, so unphotogenic but so good
A simple Sunday afternoon meal of pork roast and dumplings, more brown food, this time at Augustiner
Sampling Augustiner’s Weissbier
You won’t be able to nibble on cute tapas bites or pulled pork sandwiches or Korean fried chicken, served on wood cutting boards, but instead feast on heaping portions of stodgy brown food – schnitzel, roast pork, potato dumplings, sauerkraut. And by stodgy, I mean everything that is good and perfectly paired with a tall stein of beer – it’s stick to your ribs grub that will definitely soak up your beer and quite possibly offend all your vegetarian friends. Best of all it’s completely uninstagrammable.
And some more brown stuff – delicious Apple Strudel at Hofbräuhaus
With literally hundreds of people to serve each evening, I was amazed that the food came out within 10 minutes of ordering. Normally I would look at such a set up with skepticism but for me this is not the place to question, to judge, to nitpick. In fact, any pretense was left at the door when I entered the premises. The lovely thing about these bierhalls, aside from the copious portions of beer, is the communal environment. My friend and I sat down for a few hours, sharing a booth with a rotating group of people – cutting across generations and nationalities: an American couple visiting Europe for the first time, a group of 20 something Asian girls taking selfies, barely legal German teenage boys nursing their treasured pints. It’s a place that encourages simple enjoyment, and is easy when you have a belly full of cold beer that, for a few hours at least, drowns out the outside world.
A sunny day in Der Pschorr’s biergarten
As we hold up today’s craft beers as emblems of perfection and superiority, let’s not forget the originals, the predecessors that have carved the way and continue to satisfy and delight the senses.
Some great bierhalls to check out whilst in Munich:
- Hofbräuhaus Platzl 9, 80331 München
- Der Pschoor Viktualienmarkt 15, 80331 München, Germany
- Augustiner Neuhauserstr. 27 – 80331 München
twincitiesnylon 