Category: Travel in Europe

In my recent Top 10 blog, I mentioned that I liked the Bergkirchweih Beer Festival better than Oktoberfest. And, after going to the Berg for the second time, I still hold to that.

In fact, Chris says that I can officially state that thebeergeek.com prefers the Berg to Oktoberfest. There are many reasons that I like it better. First of all, it is a German’s beer fest. While the time changes slightly each year, for the most part, the Berg happens before the start of tourist season, so there are not many foreigners present. I think the only English we heard was from our own mouths and the mouths of those brave enough to try to talk with us.

Next, is that the Berg is smaller and much less overwhelming. That’s not to say that there are not a lot of people. Saturday night was packed with very young, very rambunctious people (read: drunk). I think I waited in line for the toilet for 45 minutes! You learn fast to better plan for bathroom stops. Sunday, Mother’s Day, was much more manageable and I think I only waited about 15 minutes for the toilet.

Mother’s Day brings me to another reason I like the Berg; it’s family oriented. This can be good or bad. It’s good in the sense that you can bring in your own picnic, water, etc. People even bring table cloths to put down as they pull out their picnic spread. The bad part is that the kid factor can be a bit much for non-breeders like us.

Yesterday we were playing scrabble when our table became overrun with a mutli-kid, multi-adult group. At one point, one of the men said “Your peace is over, with kids and Latins at the table”. (They were all speaking Spanish). He was right, but I wasn’t too worried until one especially active youngster, Christian, was practically sitting on my lap. I lost the scrabble game, by the way.

Overall, we had a great time at the Berg. The beer was plentiful, the people were friendly, and the weather was exceptional. All and all a recipe for a great beer festival.

Today we are trying again to get in a Bamberg brewery and a few others on the way to Rödental, our final stop for tonight. We learned yesterday that today is a religious holiday, Whit Monday, so we’re hoping that places will be open. I was assured last night that even religious holidays can’t keep the Germans away from their beer. Apparently Mother’s Day doesn’t either.

 

It is good to be back in Germany. This is our seventh visit to Germany and we have never been disappointed in our travels through this country. While we have only added two new breweries to our list so far, it hasn’t been for a lack of trying.

We arrived Friday late morning after two uneventful flights. Our plan was to go to a brewery in Ochsenfurt, have some lunch and then head on to our final destination of the day. We found the brewery just fine but they didn’t have any attached restaurant like I thought they did. Undaunted, we walked into town and had lunch at a small restaurant and did get to enjoy the brewery’s beers. Unfortunately, the brewery doesn’t make the list.

We spent the first night in a small town called Neuhaus at Hotel Zum Löwenbräu which is a brewery hotel. The brewery hotel is one of mankind’s greatest inventions and we have found the ones in Germany to be the nicest and least expensive places to stay. Plus, you’re guaranteed good German food and beer just a few paces from your room.

While we were enjoying dinner at the hotel on Friday night, we were wondering where all the people were. Neuhaus was a small town and the place we were staying was the only restaurant in town. On our walk the next morning, we discovered the Löwenbräu Felsenkeller, their beer garden in the the forest. It looked really cool and we figured that was where everyone was the previous evening. So, if you are ever in Neuhaus, check out the Felsenkeller.

After our walk on Saturday morning, we decided to head into Bamberg to get two of the breweries that we had missed last year. Admittedly, I could have done a bit more research, but I assumed that if we get there at noon, everything would be fine. Wrong. One didn’t open until 2pm and the other 5pm. And what we thought was funny was that on Sunday, both opened at 11am.

Denied beers in Bamberg, we headed down to Erlangen to get settled before the Bergkirchweih on Saturday night. Up the street from our hotel is the Kitzmann brewery and unlike every other place we had been to that day, it opens at 10am. So at 3pm, we enjoyed the first beers of the day and the requisite German food consisting mainly of pork.

Then it was on to the Bergkirchweih Beer Festival. The woman at the hotel desk gave us a good luck warning when we told her we were in Erlangen for the festival. Last year, we went on the last weekend. Yesterday it was the first weekend. And as you can probably guess, it was a different experience. On the last weekend, the Berg is pretty mellow; the locals are probably beer-ed out, granted a concept hard to attach to Germans.

However, the locals were going all out yesterday. And it helped that the weather was perfect; between 75 and 80 degrees.

We arrived around 5pm and easily found a table and got our first liter; we were sharing at first since it was going to be a long evening.

After talking with a German family from Bayreuth who had joined us at our table, we walked around and reminisced about the places we were just 11 months ago. We sat here… that’s the tent where the mean waitress gave us the over-salted radish… there is the oxen roasting place… It’s odd to be nostalgic about such recent events but it was on our trip last June that we embarked on our beergeek.TV adventure. So, it was interesting to be back, remembering how green we were less than a year ago.

While the festival was manageable during daylight, once it got dark, the throngs arrived and the Berg became this one big mass of drunken people.

Merideth did engage in that German tradition of drinking liters of beer and going on fast, whirling carnival rides. Someone did puke on Merideth’s ride, but it wasn’t her.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, so I assume the Berg is going to be mellow… at least until the sun sets.

 

The Year in Beer gets cranked up a notch as we make our first of five trips to Europe this year. The May edition of the YiB visits the Franconia area of Germany, one of the richest beer brewing regions in the world. And to top that off, we will finish up with a YiB side trip with our friends Ute and Wolfgang, catching three Flogging Molly shows on successive nights.

Not having the time to explain the geopolitical history of Franconia, for the sake of this preview just think of it as an area that stretches across several German states including northern Bavaria. Sprinkled throughout the region are some 300 breweries making some of the best beer in the world. And you wonder why we keep going back?

We will get 12-15 new breweries which puts both of us within striking distance of 400 breweries. [For those having nothing to do at the end of July, I anticipate both us reaching the milestone in Portland.]

Our trip begins with a return to the second largest beer festival in Germany, the Bergkirchweih Beer Festival in Erlangen. We had a such a good time last year at “the Berg” we wanted to go back. And with almost a year of video experience behind us now, maybe we will be able to do it a bit more justice.

We will also be returning to Bamberg to hit two of the breweries we missed last year. And maybe we can even find the ‘secret brewery’ that eluded us in 2007.

And we finish up the Franconian portion of the trip with a pilgrimage to Rodental, the home of the Hummel figurine factory.

We will also introduce you to one of the greatest inventions known to mankind; the brewery-hotel. While there are a few here and there in North America, there are hundreds of them in Germany.

Usually family-owned, we have stayed at a number of the brewery-hotels and find them to be the nicest, cleanest and least expensive accommodations in Germany. And since they make their own beer there isn’t too far to stumble from the biergarten or braustubl to your room. We will be staying at two of them during the trip.

After our whirlwind tour of Franconia we have another YiB side trip, meeting up with Ute and Wolfgang in Cologne for the first of three Flogging Molly shows on successive nights. Besides being huge FM fans, we are also huge fans of Kolsch, the native beer of Cologne. And Ute says she knows a place where we can get pints. The little glasses are cute but it is only two gulps for me. It gets annoying when you have to reorder every other minute.

The second show is in Munich where we are very excited to show our German friends our favorite haunts in that great city. Merideth is particularly excited to bring Wolfie to Weisses Brauhaus where the matronly waitresses can sometimes get a bit snarkey. I think we are also going to try to go to the brewpub at Munich airport.

Finally, the last show is in Vienna… our first visit to this historic city. No time to sightsee though… there are two brewpubs to hit plus the Flogging Molly show.

All and all, a beer filled trip worthy of the Year in Beer.

On an administrative note, we have made every effort to blog on each day of our YiB trips but this might come to an end. I am just not sure of our Internet access but we will make every effort to keep up our practice of posting daily.