Author: Franz Hofer

Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

So Many Beer Gardens …
Let’s assume for a moment that you love beer gardens as much as I do. You’ve explored all that there is to offer in the English Garden, you’ve visited some of the iconic beer gardens in the center of town, and you’ve headed south for a drink amid the myths and legends of Munich’s beer gardens along the Isar.

What’s left? Plenty, as it turns out.

Like the Kugler Alm, an ideal “destination” beer garden, perfect for those times you want to get out of the city center.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

Where All German Beer Paths Converge
The Reinheitsgebot (Beer Purity Law) is the alpha and the omega of German beer. Debates about its relevance go to the heart of contemporary German beer culture, and have only heated up in light of craft beer’s arrival in Germany. Even if the Reinheitsgebot of 1516 is no longer the law of the land, its spirit lives on in legislation that limits beer ingredients to barley, hops, water, and yeast. It’s a prism from the distant past that refracts all discussions about the future of German beer.

German Critiques of the Reinheitsgebot
Proponents view the Reinheitsgebot not only as a seal of quality and a productive limitation that results in exacting beers, but as the very foundation of German beer culture. German critics of the Reinheitsgebot are often champions of craft beer, problematic as some advocates of craft see the term. Their critique revolves around the perception that the Reinheitsgebot is a constraint on creativity.

If some critics, such as Nina Anika Klotz, ultimately reject the notion that “craft” and the Reinheitsgebot are incompatible, others veer into hyperbole.[1] Martin Droschke and Norbert Krine present a reductionist debunking of ten myths about the Reinheitsgebot in their craft beer guide to Franconia. Günther Thömmes is strong on why the Reinheitsgebot might merit revision in the twenty-first century, but thin on the ground in terms of history, implying that nothing changed between 1516 and 1871 (which isn’t the case—I’ll have a follow-up article about that at some point).[2]

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Kachelofen at Hopf in Miesbach

Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

It was the early 1990s. I had only recently discovered what German beer was all about, and was doing my level best to try as many of them as possible. Occasionally, my friends and I would find our way past the cheap student pubs and happen upon a traditional establishment. Those moments always had something of a magical quality about them. I couldn’t help but notice heavy-beamed ceilings here, a few antlers there, and happy imbibers everywhere. Aside from the happy imbibers, I’d never seen anything quite like this in my hometown of Vancouver.

Back then it was more of a sense of enchantment with my surroundings, and perhaps the vaguest desire to know more about them. But my true fascination with the Wirtshaus is of more recent vintage, dating back to the time when I arrived in Vienna a decade ago to begin a stint at the Wien Museum. Once my Wien Museum colleagues found out that I was into beer, they started inviting me out for drinks at places called Wirtshäuser. These modest establishments were culinary institutions in Vienna, they told me.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

My Kind of Beer
Around this time last year I penned a series that began with an account of my tastes in beer, followed by an exploration of the kinds of beers I like. The series ended with a list of twenty-five beers that had caught my attention over the previous year.

The latter post resonated particularly well (people seem to love lists), so I’m back this year with a selection of beers worth seeking out in 2025. Since 2024 was a busy year for travel for me, I’m spotlighting fifty beers this year. You might also want to pair this list with the one I wrote last year. That’ll give you an additional twenty-five beers for your beer hunting adventures.

A Few Notes
Selection: As with last year, I confine my selection to beers I drank during the previous year. I returned to some places I hadn’t visited in decades, and visited some cities and regions for the first time. You’ll see beers from the Allgäu (a region that straddles Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg), Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, northern Germany (Lübeck, Stralsund, Berlin), and also Central Germany (Goslar, Göttingen). You’ll also see plenty of beers from Belgium, which I visited for the first time since the pandemic. What you won’t see are many beers from North America. That’s not a commentary on all the fine beers that surround me here.

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Back in January I sat down with All About Beer Podcast hosts Don Tse and Em Sauter to talk about beer travel with co-guest Chris O’Leary of Brew York. The timing was fitting: I had just arrived back in Oklahoma after a 24-hour journey from Vienna and an autumn’s worth of beer travel in Europe. Over the course of the hour, we talked about what makes beer travel special, and what kinds of experiences make beer travel worth the cost and effort. You can listen to that podcast here.

Whenever I get asked to appear on podcasts, but there’s always plenty that gets left out due to time constraints. More often than not, my prep notes just collect dust in folders strewn about. But in this case, those remainders give me the opportunity to do two things:

Share some tips on planning your beer travels.
Introduce you to my new side gig I started up last year, Beerscapes Beer Travel, which works with folks to create custom beer travel itineraries in Europe.
Before we get into those travel tips, it’s worth taking a moment to talk about why I love beer travel, and why you probably would as well. I’ll also outline three different modes of beer travel as a means of introducing Beerscapes Beer Travel.

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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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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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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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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard</h3>

In between evenings of losing myself in my annual “big book” (Don Quixote this year), I’ve been reading Terry Theise’s What Makes Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime. Theise makes a compelling case that people who write about wine or who sell wine for a living be forthcoming with their readers and customers about their tastes.

WHY ACCOUNT FOR TASTE?
It’s a simple premise: writers and critics should examine their taste proclivities so that their readers know where they stand. As Theise asserts, this is the first obligation of the critic, whether that person is writing about wine, beer, art, or music. It’s what buttresses our credibility. And, I’d add somewhat paradoxically, it’s what makes our judgments and pronouncements that much more “objective.” (More on that below.)

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