The beer drinkers' guide to Munich and Bavaria

For this entry I've given over the writing duties to my husband, Piers. He was the one who chose Bavaria for his birthday trip, and his taste for beer is a lot stronger than mine.  In fact, his taste in beer is sensitive enough to yield some excellent tasting notes for all the local variations we tried.  It was only fair to insist he shared them with you.

So, as a direct result of my demanding to go to Bavaria in search of my roots – and, I might add, to open Ellen’s eyes more to the wonders of Germanic culture – I fear, dear reader, that I have been imposed on your again.

A lot has been written about Bavaria and beer, so I shall only tell some of the history of weissbier, how it got around the German beer purity law and then move on to concentrate on the beers and our experiences of them. If I miss something out that you believe is important, please forgive me.

I hope that you know about how beer is made, as I won’t be covering that here. 

The Rheinheitsgebot (or German beer purity law) is over 500 years old and famously demanded that beer was made using barley, water and hops only. So what of weissbiers, I hear you cry? Aha! That is the point. Weissbiers are wheat beers and the Rehinheitsgebot was designed to restrict the use of wheat for bread -- not beer. A series of wheat harvest failures triggered legislation to ensure that the precious grain was saved for food rather than drink.

Now, by this time we have all heard of the Wittelsbach family (whaddya-mean-you-haven’t? You obviously need to read Ellen’s earlier Bavarian blogs). These glorious rulers of Bavaria were not just extravagant builders but also not beyond monopolising trade. In 1520, four years after the extension of the Rheinheitsgebot to all of Bavaria by the Wittelsbachs, they granted the sole right to brew Weissbier in Bavaria to a vassal family called the Degenbergs. For a significant sum. In 1602, the Duke of Degenberg died without heir and the title and all assets (including the right to brew weissbier) reverted to the Wittelsbachs. Duke Maximillian I, the then suzerain, kept the monopoly, extended his new right to all of his land and summoned the Degenbergs' master weissbier brewer to Munich to become his own. The brewer built a brewery in Munich on the site where the Hofbrauhaus now stands and got to work. Weissbier was as popular as ever and the profits went straight to the government (as the Hofbrauhaus profits still do today). They alone paid for the Bavarian army during the thirty years war against the Swedish, just 11 years later.

So, eventually, every town and village had its own Wittelsbach weissbier brewery. But even in conservative Bavaria, tastes eventually change. In the 18th Century drinking weissbier went out of fashion. As the value of the monopoly declined, from providing a third of all state revenue, the crown began to lease its breweries out to the locals. In 1798 it even decreed that any nobleman or monastery could brew weissbier. The decline lasted for about 160 years (have we mentioned how conservative the Bavarians are?), when it got a revival in the 1960s ... not just in Germany, but in the rest of the world as well.

“But enough about history, what about beer?” I hear you demand. Well, in our traipsing around Bavaria (and Austria) we drank more than a few pints (litres?) a day.  All in the name of research for you, dear reader. (It’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.)

Of the six major breweries in Munich, we drank at five of them. We missed Spaten, but few people remember them as a major brewery and neither did we. (Always leave something to go back for.) We also drank four of the five major varieties: Helles, Dunkel, Helles Weissbier and Dunkel Weissbier; we didn’t drink any Bock, but then I can’t remember having seen that on any menus. We did try the Oktoberfestbier or Marzen, unsurprising given the timing of our trip. We also tried the two varieties of shandy: Radler (Lemonade mixed with Helles) and Rus’n (Lemonade mixed with Weissbier) – more of which later.

Lowenbrau Original

This is supposed, by some, to have tobacco and smoke aromas and have a sweet, grassy, vanilla and metallic taste. It may have been the temperature that it was served at, but if there were smoke aromas, it was a dry smoke and the vanilla was swallowed by the metal. I found it thin, clean (ie: with little taste) and somewhat reminiscent of what could be called “euro fizz” or generic lager. In short, nothing to write home about, certainly compared to other beers drunk.

Franziskaner Hefe-Weissbier

‘The Franziskaner of my youth’: memories of the Franziskaner merry-go-round are raised by the reminders of my previous trip, the two quarter litre beer glasses on my shelf at home (it was all they served on the merry-go-round in 2004 on the Wieszen). One of my tasks, this year, was to find and have a drink on that Franziskaner merry-go-round. I have to report, dear reader, that I failed – not because it was lunchtime on the opening day and we had no chance of a drink on the Wieszen, it was more fundamental than that: they obviously rotate who gets to serve on the merry-go-round as this year it was HofBrau and not Franziskaner whose Weissbier was served there. Have no fear, Mike and crew, we raised a glass to you elsewhere.

But memories don’t get to tell you about this delightful brew. It is round and creamy, with a ‘tropical and grainy texture’ (according to one tasting note). I don’t know about tropical, I certainly got a bready flavour, but then it’s wheat beer so you would, wouldn’t you. I also got a taste of vanilla and lemon curd and a hint of warmth/spiciness.

Franziskaner Dunkels Weissbier

Don’t mistake this for a dark barley based beer; so far as we could see, Franziskaner only brews weissbier. This has a lovely round, malty, toffee and coffee flavour as well as the ‘normal’ creaminess of weissbier. It doesn’t really have that much bitterness, just enough to cut through the rest of the flavours. It was probably the most drunk beer of the trip (at least by me).

Hofbräu Munchener Sommer

I honestly didn’t think that Germans brewed Bluemoon, or drank it, yet this is the most similar taste that I could think of. Whilst it had more hoppy bitterness at the fore in the taste, I definitely got a deal of orange rather than a sharper citric taste of lemon (as in a Franziskaner Weissbier for example). This is still a barley based beer but it had a lot more roundness than the Lowenbrau Original.

Hofbräu Dunkel

This is a dark lager. It is supposed to have a toasty, malty and caramel flavour with the crispness of a lager. I found it to have the maltiness and toastiness described, but I didn’t find the caramel (or maybe the caramel had gone over). Having identified the tastes mentioned above, I found it to be thin and bitter – not something I would normally go towards just for drinking, but it may be better with food (possibly a curry?).

Hofbräu Rus’n

So to the first of the shandies, I had never tried weissbier shandy before. If this is indeed named after Russian emigres, I would suggest that it shows the disdain that Bavarians have for Russians. I found it to be incredibly sweet thick and almost like liquid honey, mass produced rather than a lavender or acacia honey. I wondered if this is what mead tastes like (and have yet to find out – so little time, so much to do).

Augustiner Brau Munchen Oktoberfestbier

Let this brewery not be mistaken for the Salzburg variant of the Augustinian brewers. We had several of the Munich variant’s excellent beers, stumbling upon a street party for the release of this beer, a day or so before the opening of the Oktoberfest proper.

This beer is medium weight, heavier and more rounded than a Helles lager but not as creamy as a weissbier. Not really that bitter, just enough to remind you that you are drinking a lager, it was also light but hoppy in taste. Whereas some Helles beers reminded me of the clean, metallic taste of many northern German lagers, this reminded me more of Czech lagers like Pilsner Urquell or Budvar (the lagers I would normally drink at home). In short, very nice indeed.

Augustiner Munchen Dunkel

A dark barley beer, which has the characteristic caramel hoppiness and burnt flavour of a Dunkel Helles beer, it was somewhat more rounded than many other Dunkels we tasted on the tour.

Tucher Helles Hefe Weizen

Just to prove that we didn’t just drink beer in Munich, this weissbier is from Nurnberg. Ellen though that this had a heavier weight in the mouth than other weissbiers and she noted a smoky bacon taste; I thought that this might have been there as an after taste, but I couldn’t find it in the body of the beer. I tasted a bitterish lemony flavour, which to me brought the hoppiness more to the fore than is usual in weissbiers.

König Ludwig Dunkels Wiessbier

We had this beer in the valley between Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein castles, rather appropriate really as the beer is actually brewed by the current Prince Luitpold and is also known as Prinzregent Luitpold Weissbier Dunkel. It has less of the creaminess of many weissbiers, tasting slightly drier and with a coffee taste coming through.

If I were to pick just one of the above to drink from now on, I would be caught in a cleft stick between the Franziskaner Dunkels Weissbier and the Augustiner Oktoberfestbier; I would probably have to come down on the side of the Franziskaner in the end, but it would be a struggle. The final argument would be down to volume, can I get it all year around and the Augustiner is only available as a seasonal beer.

I have come from this experience with the intention of trying other beers, possibly even ales and bitters which I have previously dismissed as I have always considered myself a lager drinker. Naturally, the above are only personal tasting notes on some of the beers we drank. Others may taste banana, cloves, coriander and other flavours. I hope that it has given you an idea of the ‘sheer hell’ we went through on your behalf and given you thoughts of trying some of them for yourself.

Go on, prove me wrong – although tasting is on the tongue and nose of the ‘beholder'.