Welcome to the new Oakes Weekly
As many of you will know, Beershine and I have gone wandering. We left Miami Beach in late May, had a couple of days in Paris and then ended up at the Weekend of Spontaneous Fermentation. From there, it was summer in Bamberg. And while we’ve moved on from Germany for the time being, I still have a lot to say about the beer scene and quality of life there.
The first thing that strikes me is just how much beer we left on the table. We visited over 100 breweries and tried something like 500 beers in the three months we lived in Bamberg and yet there are dozens of breweries not far away that we still have not visited. The beer scene in Franconia is that crazy. It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like twenty years ago, when there were an extra 100 or so breweries in the region.
The one thing that continually bugged me as I entered my beer notes, is the number of low scores. Invariably, they come from bottled product. The thing is, Franconian beer is not meant to be consumed from the bottle. By and large, these are fresh products and are served from the barrel. Many are served from the wood. Indeed, Franconia is one of the last bastions of Old World beer culture.
A lot of it is based around village life, something that the urbanites in Nürnberg are less attuned to, and even the youngsters in Bamberg don’t always grasp the beauty of. But if you go to a festival like Bamberg’s giant five-day Sandkerwa, you see how much Franconians love their rural roots. Country breweries are very well represented at the festival, along with the urban Bamberg brewers. Schlenkerla probably drains more beer from their wooden barrels in five days there than they sell in a year in all of their export markets.
But the list of other brewers is tremendous – Wagner Merkendorf, Hummel, Wagner Kemmern, Fischer Freudeneck, Hausbräu Stegaurach, Zur Sonne, Recken, Huppendorfer, Hebendanz, Hartmann, Hubner, Löwenbräu Buttenheim, St. Georgenbräu, Beck-Bräu, Hönig, Krug Geisfeld and even tiny Büttner. This is in addition to Heller, Spezial, Mahr’s, Kaiserdom, Fässla, Tucher, Weismainer, and a couple of other bigger brewers. I should point out that this is NOT a beer festival. Over 25 breweries and it is not even a beer festival. Meditate on that. That’s how beery Franconia is.
It’s sad we’ve left and we miss the beer greatly, but there is more to life than beer and that, ultimately, is what this column is going to be about. See you next week!
