Professor Good Ales

Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankardmarshlands of Murnau as the train trundled along the Loisach valley. As we dipped into the basin that cradles Oberammergau, the sun emerged in full splendour, illuminating the tusk-shaped Kofel that towers over the valley.

Oberammergau is everything you’d imagine a Bavarian alpine village to be. Chalets with carved balconies and flower boxes. A church steeple in the center of town. And mountains all around. Ettal is Oberammergau’s opposite number to the south, and home to a majestic monastery.

For the imbibingly inclined among us, there are breweries and Wirtshäuser in both villages. And for those who like wandering, both places are close enough to each other that you can traverse the distance on foot in a matter of hours.

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If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: You can never have too much Munich in your life.

But what about those times you really do need a break from the big city? Maybe some meadows dotted with cows, Alpine scenery, pristine lakes, or all three?

Last week I posted on my Facebook page about breweries, beer halls, and beer gardens in Munich on the assumption that folks arriving soon for Oktoberfest might want to see a bit more of the city. This week I’m extending the geographical reach to encompass places along the S-Bahn lines and local trains that branch out from Munich, this time on the assumption that you might want to escape the hustle and bustle of Munich for an afternoon in the countryside.

What follows is an introduction to just shy of ten beer spots to visit once you’ve imbibed the charms of Munich, all within thirty minutes to an hour and change from Munich via public transport or regional train.

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Written by Franz Hofer for a Tempest in a Tankard

Cantillon with its cobwebbed rafters sheltering rows of barrels. The cheerfully riotous Delirium Café. Moeder Lambic with its rare beers. The Morte Subite, elegantly attired in art nouveau. You could spend days or even weeks in Brussels without coming close to exhausting your possibilities for memorable beer experiences. One of my faves is the quirky — and, for English speakers, devilishly difficult-to-pronounce — Poechenellekelder.

Master of Puppets
A one-time puppet theater, Poechenellekelder hides out in plain view across from one of the most famous statues in the world. The café does get its share of tourists, many of whom sun themselves on the large terrace that spills out in the direction of Manneken Pis, but it’s not nearly as touristy as Delirium Café on the other side of the Grand Place.

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In looking through past posts in The Pour Fool, I was astonished to find that the last time I did a post about Echoes Brewing, of tiny Poulsbo, Washington, was 2021. December 27th or 2021, in fact. At the time, Echoes was pretty much brand new and brand new breweries, as a rule, take some time to get cranked up. But around here – here being the greater Seattle area – that crank-up period has been sharply abbreviated by the fact of brewers with a TON of experience being the owners of brand new breweries. Adam Robbings, a wonky and gifted home-brewer, opened Reuben’s Brews in 2012 and it took off like a scared antelope into a level of brewing skill rarely seen, well, anywhere. Colin Lenfesty, a veteran brewer at several places around the area, opened Holy Mountain Brewing and spawned jaw-dropping ales from Day One.

It happens…but not very often.

But when J Mark Hood, brewmaster at the now-defunct Sound Brewery, Washington’s first and best specialists in Belgian-style ales, lost Sound after a client placed a mammoth order of an Imperial Stout and then stiffed him, he found new owners among his own client base and moved just across the street, into an old auto shop building. Nobody who had ever tried Sound beers was surprised when Echoes just, basically, kept right on producing at the same level. Washington’s truly iconic Belgian Abbey-style ale, Monk’s Indiscretion, was born at Sound and adopted by Echoes…but it grew up a bit in transition. The reason: Mark finally had back all the time he used to put into being Sound’s administrator and got back to brewing. His ideas evolved. His skills had already evolved when Echoes first opened. And in the years since, I contend and will continue to say, Echoes Brewing – right now, not someday down the road – is one of the best and most significant breweries in the Pacific Northwest.

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A VISIT LONG OVERDUE
The stars finally aligned with bus schedules, opening times, weather, and my schedule for a trip out to the illustrious Brauerei Zehender, brewers of the highly regarded Mönchsambacher Lagerbier. I arrived an hour early, so I turned the outing into a short beer hike, because why not?

Up into the wooded hills I went to drink in the cool air of the forest, then wandered back down into the radiant heat of the valley. I arrived at Brauerei Zehender shortly after it opened its doors at 3:00 p.m. to a terrace already filling up with locals quaffing mugs of the house tipple.

A STERLING REPUTATION
Mönchsambacher Lagerbier’s reputation precedes it. Aficionados of Franconian beer speak about it in reverential tones. The beer has even found a following among Berlin’s craft beer devotees, with Mönchsambacher Lagerbier a fixture at Muted Horn in Neukölln and Biererei in Kreuzberg.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

The sun was already low in the autumn sky as I finished up my beer at the legendary Waldwirtschaft (WaWi) and headed north toward the equally legendary Gutshof Menterschwaige. I’d been to the WaWi several times over the years, but hadn’t yet made it to the Menterschwaige on the other side of the Isar River. The weather doesn’t always cooperate with the best laid beer garden plans. But today was the day.

The short walk from the WaWi to the Menterschwaige takes you down a path toward the foot bridge spanning the Isar, and then up to a wooded trail along the embankment high above the Isar. It’s this kind of walk that gives you a sense of how the topography of the Isar Valley favoured the sinking of beer cellars from Munich all the way up to Bad Tölz at the foot of the Alps. The cellars no longer store beer, but the stands of trees still cast their shade over the cellars for those of us who enjoy the respite of the beer garden.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

Nestled amid leafy-green hills cradling the Neckar River, Tübingen is a mere thirty kilometers from Stuttgart but centuries closer to the Black Forest. Timber and stucco houses line the market squares where folks gather in cafes to while away the afternoon. Escher-esque lanes and stairs ascend to churches and descend to the Neckar, where punt-boats float languidly past people strolling along the plane-tree promenade. Over it all rises the turreted Schloss Hohentübingen, an erstwhile fortress with magnificent views over the russet rooftops of the Altstadt.

Tübingen is a venerable old university town steeped in literature and science. Johannes Kepler peered through telescopes to study planetary motions, and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin spent much of his life here. (If you’re into German literature, be sure to visit the Hölderlin Turm on the banks of the Neckar.)

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Craft beer in North America has stalled. That much is plain to see.

From the era of annual double-digit growth, which has lasted for an inordinately long period from craft’s naissance in the early 1980s until the late 2010s, the past few years have seen more-or-less stagnant sales, with the US seeing a 1% drop in production in 2023.

Craft beer’s overall annual market share inched up 0.2% last year but the less-than-buoyant figures have left most industry participants and many observers wondering what the future could hold and how (or even if) it might be possible to restore the sector to growth.

At the core of this quandary is the fact that, for most of craft beer’s existence, brewers, industry watchers, and even many drinkers have struggled to define precisely what makes craft beer ‘craft.’ Size was a good marker, until some breweries grew sufficiently large that it wasn’t, and using ingredients as a yardstick was always going to be a non-starter in an industry segment that from the outset has self-defined as iconoclastic.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

A TECTONIC SHIFT

At first blush, the Munich Baker-Brewer Dispute might look like a curious footnote in the annals of medieval history.[1] But it’s much more than that. Flaring up sporadically between 1481 and 1517, this inter-guild dispute is not only a colorful story, it also illuminates a momentous transformation in brewing history: the shift from top fermentation to bottom fermentation in Bavaria, and the emergence of what we now call lager. For when we zoom in and focus on what the decades-long dispute was all about, we notice something interesting: yeast.

Besides furnishing us with documentary evidence confirming that medieval brewers and bakers knew what yeast was, the dispute also reveals that brewers were beginning to practice a different kind of brewing.[2] Significantly, the yeast for this new process required more time and lower temperatures. What’s more, brewers discovered that more malt, higher hop rates, and long periods of cold storage resulted in a beer that was resistant to souring microbes during fermentation, kept longer, and, most importantly, tasted better.

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