The greatest places in the world to drink beer
The front door at Gastst?tte Lommerzheim, Cologne’s most charismatic pub, has barely shut before it swings open again. A middle-aged couple hurry in, share a joke with the blue-shirted bartender and weave their way between tightly packed tables in search of seats. They’ll be lucky. It’s just gone 6pm on a Wednesday but the place is full of customers contemplating fist-thick pork chops and slim, cylindrical glasses of K?lsch, the pale, delicately floral beer that is native to this Rhineland city.
If you want a genuine taste of Cologne, this is where you need to come, and P?ffgen K?lsch, the only beer available here, is what you drink. Well, maybe. You could go to one of the many other great Cologne pubs and brewery taps selling different brands, I suppose, but the key point is this: if you’re visiting this city, you won’t get the full experience unless you’ve had a K?bes – a Cologne waiter, noted for dispensing beer and attitude – plant a foam-topped glass of golden K?lsch in front of you.
Beer tourism is an idea whose time has come, and not only in the Old World. Cities such as Wellington in New Zealand (the craft-beer capital of the southern hemisphere, where you can visit Garage Project, a world-beating brewery) and San Diego in California, which is the place to go for super-hoppy American double IPAs, have built global reputations.
Good beer is nearly everywhere now – and while there’s plenty of me-too IPAs, local flavour is still easy to find. Beer is particularly worth seeking out in its native environment. It’s more delicate than wine or spirits; it doesn’t travel well and, for the most part, gets worse as it gets older. Fresh is best: if you haven’t drunk Munich Helles in Munich, for example, you haven’t really drunk it at all (and if you’ve not tried Augustiner Helles at €3.90 (￡3.45) a half-litre, poured from a wooden barrel at Nürnberger Bratwurst Gl?ckl am Dom, what have you been doing with your life?).
Nowhere is the beer industry more tourist-friendly than in the United States, the home of modern brewing, where there are now 6,500 breweries (compared with just 89 in 1978). Visiting breweries is particularly popular: according to figures from the Brewers Association (BA), which represents the USA’s buoyant craft-brewing sector, almost 30 million people toured American breweries in 2017.
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“The interest in ‘beercations’, brewery visits and brewery tours continue to increase, and that’s being driven by small, independent breweries,” says Bob Pease, CEO and president of the BA. Among the best in Anchor in San Francisco, where America’s beer awakening began in 1965, when Fritz Maytag bought the then-ailing brewery. A tour costs just under ￡20. Brewery tours vary in terms of quality, of course: if you’ve seen one stainless steel conical fermentation vessel, you’ve seen them all. But historic breweries like Fuller’s in London, where the ￡20 tour takes you past preserved 19th-century equipment into the energy of a modern brewery, and Pilsner Urquell in Pilsen, where the tour (which costs 250 Czech crowns, or about ￡8.60) finishes in the chilly, mazelike caves where the beer was once fermented, are worth a few hours of anyone’s time.
And then there are the festivals, of which hundreds have sprung up in recent years. Some are superb – Good Beer Week in Melbourne is my favourite, because that city’s wonderful food scene plays a central role and it takes place in May, when ticket prices to Australia are cheap; I went for just over ￡500 return with Singapore Airlines in 2015 – while others could do with a bit of work. I once watched a young Czech man almost brought to tears as the keg machine serving his beer pumped out apologetic little parps of foam rather than beer, due to the heat.
But the greatest thing about beer travel is the way it offers a window into cultures. I was chatting to Michel Debus, the 91-year-old grand homme of Alsatian brewing, last November when he explained how this most unique of French regions actually works. “It’s quite strange,” he said, “but Alsace is split in two. North of Strasbourg it’s beer, and to the south is wine – and the brewers are traditionally Protestant while the winemakers are Catholic. They have winstube [restaurants that serve wine], we have beerstube. You can draw a line to separate the two.” You can find out for yourself; the train from London via Paris to Strasbourg takes under five hours, for as little as ￡50 each way.
Franconia, the northern third of Bavaria, also sits on Europe’s historic religious fault-line, but here brewers come from both sides of the divide. I’ve been a number of times; it’s very cheap to fly into Nuremberg from London or Manchester and take the 40-minute journey north to Bamberg, the brewing capital of the region. You can even stay in a brewery: both Spezial and F?ssla, which face each other across Obere K?nigstrasse, have rooms; a single with shower at the former costs €55.
There’s nowhere in the world where good, simple beer is as much a part of everyday life. I remember drinking a glass of Mahr’s Br?u’s beautiful, gently toasty Ungespundet as a group of male friends arrived one by one at the adjoining table in the brewery taproom. As each man turned up, he knocked on the table to say hello – a small but charming tradition that says so much about that neighbourly part of the world.
Ungespundet, by the way, means “unbunged”, or softly carbonated; it’s like a cask ale, except this is amber lager. The difference between ale and lager is two-fold: the yeast used, and the extra conditioning time lager gets. Regular trips to Germany and the Czech Republic have taught me that lager can be just as delicious as ale, whatever pub bores in the UK might think.
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Beer is a great way to experience local eccentricities. They do not have the loose-limbed ease of southern Europe, true, but the traditional beerlands of Europe – which stretch from Scotland down into the Czech Republic and Austria – are superbly rich in culture. One of my favourite places is the Augustiner brewery (no relation to its Munich namesake) in Salzburg, Austria, where – after climbing the hill to the brewery – you must fetch your stoneware mug from a shelf, rinse it with water, take it to be filled with superb beer, and then, finally, pay. The reward for all that work is – weather permitting – a seat under a chestnut tree in the brewery’s huge and beautiful garden.
And if you prefer some southern warmth, that works too; all the cool kids in Barcelona and Rome are drinking craft beer these days. Even Paris, the haughtiest of wine’s citadels, is beginning to fall for hops and malt. I went to the Grand Finale, the central event of Paris Beer Week, in June and was impressed by the youth and diversity of the crowd, and the quality of the beer. One Paris brewery, Gallia, was particularly striking; an old name revived in 2009 to brew a traditional, straight-down-the-line pale lager, it’s now making a variety of more interesting stuff because brewer Remy Maurin proved that was what young Parisians wanted. You can try for yourself from Wednesday to Sunday at the brewery in Rue Méhul.
France is still evolving as a beer nation; it’s some way behind the US, for example, or New Zealand. Yeastie Boys brewer Stu McKinlay might be biased (he comes from Wellington) but he insists his home city is one of the world’s finest. Its pubs bear him out: there’s a huge number to choose from, but don’t miss Fork & Brewer, where ace brewer Kelly Ryan, who polished his skills at Thornbridge in Derbyshire, is in charge.
For me, though, it’s the classic beer cultures that hold the greatest appeal; places like Cologne, and bars like Gastst?tte Lommerzheim. That night – nearly four years ago now – I squeezed in at a four-person table alongside a father and his two sons and took in the scene around me. It was a vision of contentment. Nearby was an older man, a tartan scarf hanging loosely around his neck, sitting across from a canoodling couple; at the next table, four confident, gregarious young men were sinking glass after tiny glass of beer. Most remarkable of all, though, was the K?bes who smiled warmly as he came to collect my plate: “How was the pork chop?” It was superb, I told him, just like the beer.
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The essentials
The Great British Beer Festival (gbbf.org.uk) runs from Aug 7-11, 900 real ales at London’s Olympia
Beer week celebrations take place in cities all over the world. For those in Britain, see beercities.org.uk