Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard
Zoigl: More Than a Kind of Beer
It’s been way too long since I posted about the Oberpfalz, one of my favourite beer regions in Germany. Sure, beer in nearby Franconia is the stuff of legend. And there’s no denying the sublimity of the Alpine scenery in Upper Bavaria. But there’s something almost mystical about “Zoigl Land” in northeastern Bavaria. It’s those dense woods right up against the Bohemian frontier. It’s the streams that flow through the woods, almost silently. And it’s the captivating landscape that lends the communal brewhouses in rural towns surrounded by forests and farmland their sense of place.
Even without these enchanting surroundings, Zoigl would still be something special. In a land where lager is, for the most part, brewed to exacting standards in state-of-the-art breweries, the communal brewhouses and coolships of the Oberpfalz are an anomaly. (A coolship is a large and shallow vessel that typically resides amid the rafters of old breweries, and is a traditional way to cool the wort after it has been boiled.) The same goes for the open fermentation that many Zoigl brewers still practice.
To put it differently, the entire ethos and culture of Zoigl, from the brewing process to the places where we drink it, is an echo of the past resonating vibrantly in the present. The Zoigl tradition rejects both the standardization represented by industrial-scale breweries and the homogenization of taste represented by international beers that taste the same everywhere. This is no moribund tradition fit only for dusty ethnographic museums.
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