40 Years in Beer, Part Thirty-Three: Herzlich Willkommen in der Weltbierkulturerbe-Stadt Bamberg

Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Thirty-Two: Vienna’s “Old Whisky Malt Waltz,” a precursor of beer revolutions to come.

Keyboardist Robert Lamm of the venerable pop-rock band Chicago generally is regarded as one of his generation’s finer pop-rock songwriters, which utterly fails to explain his choice of words in the chorus of “Forever” (1986).

Forever
is a long, long time.
Longer than we ever realize.
Forever
is a long, long time.
I’m gonna love you the rest of my life.
Forever.

Trite much?

Earth to Robert: Of course forever is a long time—got anything else?

On the bright side, this song’s horn arrangement, which is positioned as an instrumental bridge, actually is an improvement on Chicago’s usual 1980s synth-driven standards (please don’t ask me how I know all this), and if I’m to be charitable, perhaps Lamm’s words aren’t quite as clunky as they appear at first.

That’s because “forever” must be contextualized. After all, there is Homo sapiens time, and there is deep time.

Most of us understand that deep time is well-nigh incomprehensible. Homo sapiens time is an expedient and purely relative construction, devised to assist us in better organizing our consciousness during the sadly finite period we’re allotted to walk the earth.

Consequently, if “forever” is taken to define expanses within a brief measurement of human life spans, then the chorus of “Forever” makes slightly better sense, assuming Lamm’s intended focus is a loving relationship, presumably a coupling lasting until “death do us part.”

Whitney Houston might have concurred: “I will always love you.” Shrug; I suppose, more or less. As for Lamm himself, he has been divorced three times, although marriage number four has in fact lasted forever—well, at least since 1991.

And it was in 1991 when I first set foot in Bamberg, Germany and immediately felt an overwhelming aura of timelessness, which by cold light of day is just another of those phantom human approximations incapable of being concretely defined by anyone, much less a beer drinker, philosophy major and all-purpose ne’er-do-well.

Or Bobby Lamm, for that matter.

If time itself is gibberish, so is timelessness, but never mind, because I contend that timelessness pervaded my consciousness in Bamberg in 1991. We never forget our first time, right?

Bamberg was like a vision of throwback paradise, a city of 70,000 boasting nine long-running traditional breweries, with dozens more scattered through the scenic Franconian hinterlands. I immediately perceived this beautiful city as exemplifying the sort of beer and brewing habitat that simply couldn’t be found in America at the time, even if we in the New World were in the process of rejigging our bastardized expectations, about to launch an incredible beer and brewing revolution that would change everything—and when it did, I remained just as fixated on Bamberg as before.

But beer was only one facet of Bamberg’s delights.

The city was a walkable kaleidoscope of postcard images, with a price structure uniformly less expensive than Munich’s, allowing for bountiful servings of pork, kraut, sausages and dumplings (as well as the inevitable Doner Kebab for sustenance after the taverns closed). The surrounding countryside could be reached by rental bicycle or bus. There were museums, a symphony orchestra, a university and a basketball team—one of Germany’s finest, in fact.

As the years pass, 1991 takes on an ever greater resonance for me. It reset the clock on my years in beer and was hugely transitional, prefacing a shedding of skin, filled with beginnings and endings, and exceedingly rare for these transitions being blatantly obvious even as they were occurring, as with the mercifully brief Gulf War and former Soviet Bloc nations embarking on the process of reverting to capitalism. By August, the USSR itself joined the prospective ex-communist queue, but we’ll get to that later.

So there I was, pushing 31, a rube from Hoosierland, finding myself perilously close to “settling down” personally as well as professionally, as always a rotary dial kind of fellow who’d had cable television for only a year and a half, and was unprepared in most respects for the ensuing explosion of connectivity via the internet, electronic media and mobile phones.

Hence Bamberg’s comparative sense of timelessness, this being a half-timbered, hilltop-cathedral kind of a place where gravity-fed kegs of beer were propped on bar tops, bakeries and butcher shops made you swoon walking past, and waitresses wore dirndls. Not that Bamberg wasn’t modern. It was, although simultaneously all the Bavarian stereotypes were on display, utterly real and uncontrived, and seemingly purer than I’d previously experienced.

It can be seen in retrospect that the Cold War’s end was releasing pent-up energies, leading more quickly than usual to critical mass—as with the communication breakthroughs, Western European brewing companies hastily acquiring their Eastern European counterparts for a song before commencing liquidation and gaining whole new sales territories in the process, and for all I know, even the forthcoming advent of grunge.

But for a few magical days in Bamberg during the summer of 1991, I could let my imagination run wild, and so that’s exactly what I did.

As my cousin Don and I stepped off the train in Bamberg and studied the map, it was as yet printed on paper. In my pack reposed the Simon & Schuster Pocket Guide to Beer, by Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson, which was the sort of book that could be relied upon for general accuracy even when new editions came two or even three years apart; throughout the 1980s, the shelf lives of the annually updated travel guidebooks like Let’s Go Europe remained remarkably long.

In fact the planet wasn’t moving more slowly on its axis, and both time and timelessness are guesses subject to willful, wishful thinking. However, Bamberg was a bona fide revelation, embodying the old-school beer and brewing ways that I fairly craved as an antidote to America’s marketing-driven ephemerality.

The city seemed as if it had always been just such a beer haven, and surely it would remain so, forever, except that if pressed, I’d probably have had no choice except to grudgingly concede that yes, timelessness is a chimera.

What’s a man to do when it’s love at first sight?

32 years later and counting, I cling ferociously to my belief that Bamberg’s amazing beer culture came as the gift of a rope ladder, providentially lowered from somewhere on high, hoisting me to safety from a vat filled with insipid Miller Lite.

Did I mean it when I said it was forever?
All I know is what I feel.

It is challenging to recall my first glimpses of Bamberg in 1991 without coloring them with memories from the many times I’ve returned since. The city understandably has changed, and I’ve been fortunate to have witnessed bits of the evolution.

Interestingly, I’ve often caught myself making analogies about Bamberg with respect to municipalities across the former East German border, except that Bamberg was situated in West Germany, and neither it nor the surrounding region of Franconia was ever in a position of having to recover from communism. Still, it is important to note that Bamberg’s Cold War-era geographical coordinates in Franconia placed it off the beaten path.

The main rail route from Munich via Nürnberg to Leipzig ran right through Bamberg (it still does), yet this meant little given the close proximity of a border that was fortified from 1961 through 1989, and moreover it wasn’t a prioritized crossing point. The largely disconnected transportation corridor served as a dead end. Quite literally in the context of post-war West Germany, Bamberg’s and Franconia’s backs were against The Wall, and consequently, in spite of modernity’s myriad amenities, daily life was a half-step slower than in the more centralized urban areas of West Germany.

This relative isolation was an unadulterated panacea for beer lovers. Many human edible and potable traditions benefit from seclusion, because concepts like “slow food,” “handcrafted” and “old school” genuinely retain their meaning and utility. As an example, brewing traditions often were preserved to a surprising degree, if accidentally and ironically, in communist East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Acknowledging beer’s pervasive cultural weight, not to mention beverage alcohol’s effects as a sedative, communist authorities moved slowly (and at times, not at all) in applying the latest scientific advancements—after all, these breakthroughs cost money, so better to designate a few bigger, more famous breweries as foreign currency workhorse exporters (among them Radeberger, Wernesgruner, Pilsner Urquell and Budvar), providing them with commensurate investment resources so they could ship as much of their output as possible elsewhere according to the prevailing five-year plan.

Many older, smaller breweries remained functional as valued contributors to communism’s mandated and feather-bedded full employment, bopping along much as they always had (albeit stripped of private ownership). They were left to serve local markets, and retained old production ways primarily because no one said they couldn’t.

My guess is that in the absence of pesky market forces and profit imperatives, and with subsistence (read: stasis) somewhat assured by annual central government funding, these breweries effectively became frozen into a hazy, bucolic and not entirely unpleasant place; alternatives were non-existent, and at the very least, any ambition to “get ahead” was precluded by political writ.

Until things finally fell apart, that is. Then the capitalist robber barons rushed in to carve the useful bits from the Warsaw Pact’s digestible carrion.

I still believe that even amid West Germany’s postwar economic “miracle,” Bamberg’s and Franconia’s out-of-the-way countryside milieu—their regional placement in a cul de sac—made it possible for their local brewing ways (and consumer preferences) to survive far longer than if they’d been located amid the faster-paced German economic mainstream.

In the early 90s, more than 300 breweries, most of them small and family owned, often with restaurants and upstairs rooms for let, were working in Franconia, an area the size of Delaware. Nine of them were in Bamberg alone, and they’d been in business for a good while. Some of them made only one or two regular beers, perhaps Vollbier Hell or Kellerbier, with perhaps a Bock as a seasonal release in winter and not springtime, as in Munich.

Apparently the otherwise common Pilsners, having been deemed as originating from other places, and had only recently started being brewed locally in great numbers when I landed in 1991. Beers in Bamberg and Franconia struck me as fuller-bodied and maybe a bit rustic in a very pleasing, flavor-packed way —and Bamberg was the last refuge of Rauchbier, or lager brewed with barley malt dried over beechwood smoke.

It was absolutely glorious, and as of 2018 and my most recent visit, Bamberg still had so much to offer that a week’s stay wouldn’t have come close to scratching the itch.

Wandering Bamberg during the summer of 1991 was tantamount to negotiating a time warp. On the one hand, the difference between Bamberg and other cities I’d visited in Germany wasn’t as obvious as reverting to black and white from color photography, and overall, the city probably possessed more modern perks than Floyds Knobs did back home.

However there were twists, like strange vintage neon signs similar to ones I’d seen in Poland and Czechoslovakia; vintage German typography; the last stand (sit?) for toilets built with “inspection shelves” of the sort that were being phased out elsewhere; and a great many people walking around town who appeared as if they were engaged as extras on a 1950s film set, with archaic cuts of suits and dresses, as well as Bavarian regalia that made me feel guilty for wearing jeans and t-shirts.

Maybe Bamberg felt this way because it hadn’t been completely devastated after WWII like so many other areas of Germany, and didn’t required massive rebuilding as with Nürnberg just down the road.

Maybe Bamberg felt this way because, as an archbishopric in heavily Catholic Bavaria, its citizens were more traditionally religious, and hence conservative.

Maybe Bamberg felt this way because rural locales usually are perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be “behind” compared with urban areas, less in thrall to the vagaries of fashion, and casting themselves in the role of preserving traditional mores while the “big city” careens off the rails.

Maybe Bamberg felt this way because all the preceding observations are accurate to greater or lesser degree, and in addition, I’d prepped myself so well to expect old-school beer delights that I was going to find them, come what may.

Whatever the reasons, I was smitten with Bamberg, and the affection has grown over the years to the point that if those wayward stars ever aligned, I’d be perfectly happy to live the rest of my life there, perhaps as the adoptive son of a German billionaire, or even better, a ward of the German state (Bundesrepublik).

Otherwise, there’d be no affording it nowadays (insert sad emoji). Bamberg still is cheaper than Munich, but Germany as a whole these days is far pricier than New Albany, and you may have noticed that my retirement savings were invested in beer, travel, gluttony and a failed New Albany brewing project. Still, if someone out there is willing to pay me to drink beer, eat pork and write about it, I can think of no better city in the world than Bamberg to punch a time clock.

But forever? I suppose anything can happen.

Next: 40 Years in Beer, Part Thirty Four: In 1991, a smoky Bamberg sojourn with Happy Helmut.