By Harley Zipori. Last week I was in Germany in a small city called Osnabrück. It doesn’t cater to tourists. I’m not sure that tourists ever flock to Osnabrück so the restaurants and pubs pretty much cater to the locals.
Osnabrück is the embodiment of my image of Europe. It’s old, elegant, refined and so unlike our little corner of the Middle East.
In my first evening exploring on my own, I stopped into a small pub called the Schmales Handtuch (and no, I don’t know how to pronounce it) that advertised Gaffer Kolsch on a small blackboard outside the front door for 1.50 Euro. That is only $2 or about 7.5 NIS, the price of a bottle of Goldstar in the supermarket. On entering the pub I found a very small room with a bar, a TV tuned to sports and a few middle aged people (see the picture I snapped before I left). I then got my first lesson in the German beer culture: the standard small beer is 200 ml, which is a very small glass. You can get larger glasses, but 200 ml is the basic, just as 330 ml is the basic size in Israel. This means you don’t have to drink as much. The 1.5 Euro Gaffer Kolsch was a 200 ml glass of pure heaven.
You can read more about Kolsch beers on Wikipedia but they are basically brewed in the city of Cologne and are not lagers but are fermented at warmer temperatures than a traditional lager and then stored at at a low temperature for aging, like a lager, a process known as lagering. The New York Times wine and beer writer, Eric Asimov (yes I checked, he is a nephew) wrote a very nice article on Kolsch beers last summer that tells about their origin and history.
The Gaffer Kolsch is very different from Krombacher, an excellent German pilsner available in Israel. I find that many German beers have a somewhat unique taste, possibly due to the yeast. I call it the German beer flavor. Becks has a little. Krombacher a bit more. The Gaffer Kolsch had it in spades and I loved it. It was refreshing, light and fragrant with only mild bitterness and I could have gone on drinking it all night except that there were a lot of other beers to explore.
As I enjoyed my Kolsch, I saw someone in the pub drinking a wheat beer. You can tell a classic wheat beer since it is a bit cloudy due to the larger amount of proteins in wheat than barley. Wheat beers in Germany are traditionally called Weissbeir (white beer), Weizenbeir (wheat beer) or Hefeweizen (literally yeast white). Having tasted the Pauliner Hefeweizen available in pubs in Israel, I had high hopes and was not disappointed. I was served a tall glass of Maisel’s Weiss from a bottle (see picture). Due to the way the bartender poured the beer, I suspected it was bottle conditioned, i.e. the final fermentation to carbonate the beer was done in the bottle as home brewers do. I later found out I was right. The 500 ml (half liter) bottle cost 3.80 Euro, around 19 NIS. This is barely more than I would pay for a small bottle of imported beer in a specialty store. Beer in Germany is very inexpensive, but anything but cheap.
Maisel’s Weiss is a typical cloudy wheat beer with the truly special, and I feel unique, taste and aroma of other German Hefeweizens. I sat there for a long time, sipping the beer, relishing the flavor and experiencing that wonderful feeling of finding a truly enjoyable beer. Later I read some not so flattering reviews of Maisel’s and upon a return visit to the pub, the last day of my visit, it wasn’t nearly as good. Just shows you what a week of drinking excellent beers can do to a person. Still it’s a genuinely good beer, balance, flavorful and tops any imported Hefeweizen I have tasted in Israel.
My next stop was the Rampendahl brew pub, the only pub in Osnabrück that brews its own beer on the premises (see the picture I took of the bar). They served two kinds a beer, a pale lager and what they called the “Special” which was a dark lager very much like a Dunkel (a mild tasting dark beer also available from Pauliner in local pubs). Both were excellent. The dark Special was smooth and malty with a lovely roast malt finish. The light beer was crisp and had that typical German beer flavor with a nice bitterness suitable for the style. What a way to start my visit.
Unfortunately, due to social pressures and work obligations, I was not able to explore too many other out of the way pubs but I did get another chance to go back to Rampendahl with my colleagues from work and on a return visit to Schmales Handtuch I had another Maisel’s Weiss and tried a Frankenheim Alt. Now I had never heard of an Alt beer but it turns out that it is very similar to a Kolsch. Both are from the northern part of Germany and both originate from a single city. The Alt comes from Dusseldorf and is a top fermenting ale that is lagered (aged at a cold temperature). It is also fairly dark, a bit darker than Goldstar. However it had a totally unique flavor that I had never encountered in any beer. It just goes to prove that there can always be surprises.
I also tried a variety of other beers, including a classic “Schwarzbier” or black bier, a very dark lager with strong flavors of roasted malt with overtones of coffee and chocolate. It has some of the characteristics of an Irish Stout like Guinness but is much, much smoother with little of the bitterness associated with pilsners or stouts.
This is also the season for Christmas beers and they were available in some of the restaurants I visited. The one I tried wasn’t anything special though, resembling a typical German lager.
Make no mistake about it, Germany is a country of beer. Sometimes stereotypes have a basis in fact. In the Frankfurt airport I saw groups of middle aged couples quaffing 500 ml cans of beer at 11 in the morning. At night, I saw middle age Germans, and some even past middle age by any one’s most liberal considerations, drinking beer in pubs in all combinations, including not a small number of groups of middle age women going to the pubs together to chill and have a couple beers.
But what beer? German beer is so far above and beyond the beer we are used to, that it’s not a fair comparison. In some cases they don’t even resemble the typical beers we are used to finding in Israel and only my knowledge of how beer is made, and the fact of that Germany has a beer purity law (from 1516 as written on the wall of the Rampendahl brewhouse) that stipulates that beer is made from malted barley or wheat, hops and yeast (and of course water) kept me from thinking that they must add some special flavoring. Even the mass produced German beers like Beck’s that we get in Israel have the hint of the special qualities that characterize the beers I tasted there. However these are pale shadows of the local German beers that were so easy to find by just walking around and being curious.
Of course I only sampled a very small number of the beers available in Osnabrück which is not even known as a beer making region. I’m sure there are many beers that I didn’t discover in my short stay and limited explorations. My main question as I think about all the beers I tasted there is whether there is any room in the German beer market for exploration and flights of fancy by daring brewers. After all Germans know beer. German beer. Maybe there isn’t even a market for a beer that doesn’t fit neatly into some well known category or other of beer that the German public knows, loves and is willing to pay for. Or maybe there is.
If you have any thoughts please send them to me by email at [email protected]. If you know of any good German beer available in Israel, let me know that too.
I am still going to plan the outing to Porter and Sons and will update everyone in my next blog.
