As noted oft times before, my first European journey in 1985 marked a huge dividing line for me. Travel abroad changed my life, irrevocably. There is what came before the inaugural European journey, and what happened after it.
And, quite a lot happened after it, including (so far) 44 other trips to Europe, with two more coming soon. As you’ve read, subsequently I stumbled into a beer career, and the rest is packed into bankers’ boxes downstairs, awaiting my election as President so there can be a proper Presidential Library.
In 1995 there came a necessary shift in travel priorities. The pace of the food and beer business was escalating, requiring more of our time and making extended absences by the owners less practical.
This consideration became even more important following “A beer lover’s dream,” Susan Reigler’s review of Rich O’s Public House in the Louisville Courier-Journal on July 29. If memory serves, Amy was in Greece on one of her excursions when the transformative review landed. I’ll have more about this later.
I suppose in a certain sense I was always a budget travel purist. My objective when headed overseas was to stay there as long as humanly possible before returning utterly destitute. Averaged together, my first six trips clocked in at slightly over two months each.
Then again, it wasn’t like I had much of a life otherwise: work, drink, rinse, repeat. At any rate, beginning in 1995 the epics wouldn’t be possible any longer, at least for a while (read: until my retirement), and in fact, I’ve managed journeys of more than a month only twice or thrice since then.
It remains that pragmatism is the most useful concept. If trips needed to become of shorter duration, they’d be taken more often. At least it was the golden age of frequent flier miles. I also began thinking about ways to organize group excursions for FOSSILS club members, Rich O’s customers and just about anyone else who wanted to come along.
In turn, around this time the beer revolution’s gathering steam meant that European breweries were getting hip to the advantages of beer tourism, and I began grasping how an enterprising operator might trace lines of supply back from the European beers we were vending, past the wholesaling middle men, through the importers to their source.
A few faxes later, guided tours (with at time startling hospitality) were set up — and faxes they assuredly were, as I was only just dipping a toe into e-mail with considerable trepidation.
Trust me, when it came to brewery tours like these, everybody won.
Rather than louts in search of free beer, my people wanted to learn about beer and brewing. They became better, more knowledgeable consumers. The entirety of the experience was far more rewarding than annual junkets to the licensed beverage association’s confab in Vegas (a city I disliked long before the Oakland A’s opted to move there).
What’s more, Britain’s stellar Campaign for Real Ale published guidebooks to the top European brewing nations: “Good Beer Guides” to Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Northern France and Czech Republic (and of course CAMRA’s own home country). I read every word in them, over and over.
These group trips became more elaborate as I learned the ropes; remember, they were only a sideline to various other main events. The first was in March of 1995. The last came in September, 2008. They took place with small groups and large; by train, minibus, motor coach and bicycle.
The final motor coach tour of the Czech Republic and Germany in 2004 was as close to perfect as human endeavors get. Afterward I decided to quit beer bussing while I was ahead, as the point had been reached where insurance, disclaimers and a need to treat these trips as a freestanding business in their own right would demand more time that I could allocate seeing as we’d launched the NABC brewery by then and were looking to expand it.
The beercycling junkets involved fewer participants and were easier to organize, and seven of them took place between 2000 and 2008. As for my opinion of those: I have very few regrets in life, but one is that I didn’t begin cycling for beers in Europe sooner, although had I done so, “40 Years in Beer” would be a novel, not a memoir.
The following tale and next week’s conclusion are offered as originally published in the F.O.S.S.I.L.S. Travel Dog under the title “Several Thousand Delta Frequent Flier Miles Later,” although edited and expanded with other writings about the same period, as well as added notes.
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It is Thursday evening, March 30, 1995. Seven residents of the Louisville metropolitan area are seated at a table deep within a huge festive building, somewhere overseas.
They are drinking. Drinking beer. It is the seventh day of the 1995 Doppelbock Viscosity Tour, and things are about to get ugly.
Then, without warning, it happens.
“Meinen Damen und Herren – Ladies and Gentlemen – we have a very special request from Biggus Dickus of Kentucky.”
Oom-pah players in authentic Bavarian attire pick up their instruments and follow the practiced hand of the bandleader, and soon the oversized main hall of the Mathäser Bierstadt (a.k.a. Beer City) in Munich* is filled with an uncharacteristic, yet oddly pleasing sound.
A neo-Tijuana brass riff rockets through the cigarette smoke.
“Love is a burning thing …”
I choke on my Triumphator Doppelbock and look across the massive wooden table at Barrie Ottersbach, who looks back and gleefully croons “fur is a burning thing.”
The music continues.
“I fell into a burning ring of fire …”
“… a burning ring of dung,” echoes a delirious Ottersbach.
Biggus looks pleased, and he should be. Three empty liter masses are lined up in front of him, and his cassette tape player is rolling.
It is Big Dick’s (a.k.a. Rick Lang’s) first trip to Europe, and I had drawn the lucky raffle ticket entitling me to be his chaperone. Never did I imagine that it would entitle me to a rendition of Johnny Cash performed by the Tuba-Teutonic Waltz Kings.
Sometimes, things just don’t work out like you’d planned, but better.
Hardy Bands of Travelers.
The Doppelbock search was the first of three European journeys I had the good fortune to undertake in 1995. In March I was accompanied by Lang, Ottersbach, Rick Buckman, Dave Pierce, Bob Reed and George Schroeder, and this merry band visited Prague, Bamberg and Munich for a total of ten days. Danish F.O.S.S.I.L. Kim Wiesener (see below) joined us for the Prague portion.
Then in August, I flew to Prague, via Zurich, to meet George Hrabčak and Frank Thackeray, and to visit with George’s family in Ostrava and Prague before setting off with Frank to Slovakia and Hungary, again for a total of ten days.
Finally, in October I tagged along with Pierce, John Dennis and Ron Downer (Tennessee microbrewer and friend of Dave’s) for a whirlwind, ten-day beer tour of Dusseldorf (one day), Cologne (four hours) and Belgium, during which I took a brief two-day side trip to Copenhagen to visit Danish FOSSILS Wiesener and Kim Andersen. (1)
This adds up to the staggering (believe it) total of 30+ days, 12 F.O.S.S.I.L.S., between 150 and 200 different beers sampled (not counting multiple portions) and pubs and drinking establishments far too numerous to list, not to mention the sheer weight of humor and happenings springing from the places and the camaraderie, all of which defies my ability to recount.
In the following pages, I’m attempting to do no more than sketch the high points of these three wonderful learning and imbibing experiences.
Prague, Woodrow Wilson Station, March 24.
The train from Germany had come and gone, and contrary to expectation, it had not disgorged six eager tourists from America looking to drink dry of Pilsner Urquell the fascinating city of Prague.
It could mean only one thing. My friends had missed their rail connection, and now they were doomed to flounder around Frankfurt and drink that city’s nondescript Binding Pils while dodging the Polizei cars speeding past them on the way to apprehend the drug dealers who congregate in the parks barely a beer-cap’s finger-flip away from the towering, atypical skyscrapers of Germany’s banking capital and prime transport hub.
Indeed, the first train had left Frankfurt without them owing to the unexplained lateness of the US Air flight from Pittsburgh, but the group made the next train, and Wiesener joined me a second time at the platform to meet it. We’d been slumming all day on Castle Hill.
It was a momentous occasion as Dickus, Barrie, George, David, Rick and Bob emerged from the rail car, heavily laden with baggage and the vast debris of the nonstop, seven-hour party that had broken out on the train.
Pierce was mumbling something that sounded like “Lolita, Lolita …”
Ominously, Ottersbach waved an enormous pepper-coated salami, nearly impaling himself when he tripped over a carelessly discarded bottle of beer. A money clip tumbled from Dave’s pocket and was effortlessly scooped up by the slick-fielding Dickus. Rick attempted to shake my hand but couldn’t without first putting one of his beers into a coat pocket. Within seconds, Kim and I understood that each of them was helplessly swizzled.
And we’d had a few of our own.
We led the group down into the subway, rode one stop, bolted from the escalator and guided the weaving foreigners to the Hotel Opera, which is conveniently located ten minutes by foot to the east of Wenceslas and Old Town Squares. After registration and the stowing of packs and suitcases, it was decided to venture off in search of beer, but the pickings were slim in the immediate vicinity of the hotel. We finally spilled into a small pub/restaurant, where draft Gambrinus was available.
Contradicting the signs on the wall, the indifferent people on duty let us know that the kitchen was closed. The beer tasted flat and old. We left, but not before learning a lesson about the way it used to be during Communist times. Back at the hotel, I negotiated with staff; for a specified wink wink – nudge nudge “kitchen is closed” surcharge/gratuity, we feasted on beefsteak, fries and bottled Pilsner Urquell.
That’s more like it.
The next two days were filled with long walks through the city, rest stops in the many pubs and reflections on the ways that the city has and hasn’t changed since the demise of Communism. Although the graceful Baroque arches of old Prague are gradually yielding to the golden McDonald’s variety, and the facades where rote pronouncements of socialist solidarity once were unfurled now bear the neon language of multinational commerce, most of the classic virtues of the Czech capital remain wonderfully intact.
Herzlich Wilkommen nach Deutschland.
On the 27th, we left Prague for Germany, stopping along the way to visit the Pilsner Urquell brewery in Plzen.
Urquell, the most famous Czech beer, has been a constant in my travels since 1987, when Barrie and I made our first, unsuccessful visit to the brewery in Plzen. Our 1995 visit enabled him to fulfill his dream of being able to pass through the hallowed Urquell gate, but it also served to illustrate the huge extent to which things have changed in eight years. (3)
We learned that the renowned wooden fermenters and aging vessels have entirely given way to stainless steel, and that the lagering time has been cut in half, from three months to a month and a half. We saw the way that Pilsner Urquell’s management has adapted to the post-Communist market by emphasizing cleaner, updated labels for the brewery’s line of products, with the result that the archaic “Prazdroj 12°” signs once seen everywhere are being supplanted by contemporary ads and promos.
It was a surprise when we were given the opportunity to sample the brewery’s new German-style wheat beer, and pleased with its faithfulness to the Bavarian prototypes. Finally, the group was able to enjoy several after-tour beers in a facility that would have been unimaginable in 1987: A huge, new, German-style beer hall capable of seating 700 people that occupies the site of at least part of an old malting.
Next stop was Bamberg. It snowed, and we walked through the storm to find the taproom of the Mahr’s brewery, where the Weizenbock kept us warm. A tour of the Kaiserdom brewery was interesting, but little was learned about smoked lager, which we drank in abundance at the Spezial brewpub and the restaurant of Schlenkerla, Bamberg’s most justifiably famous Rauchbier. The food at the Maisel Bräustubl, our small hotel, was as good as I remembered it, and locals taught us something each evening when we shared tables with them at the pubs.
Too few Americans visit Bamberg, and that’s good. (4)
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The tour ended in Munich, home of excess and overkill in almost every aspect of the beer drinking experience, and a place where Barrie feels at home like nowhere else. The Munich portion of the trip featured a fine brewery tour of Spaten, ending with a truly bountiful lunch at the brewery’s banquet room atop its grain silo, with tremendous views of Munich and as much beer as we cared to drink.
It was a fine day, but there was more to come.
Guido’s Tithe.
Guido was the nicest Italian man we never met in Munich. Although he didn’t know us, he took us on a trip to the countryside, bought beers and food, and even paid for taxi rides.
On our last day in Munich, as David, Rick and I exited the Pension Hungaria to go into the city center for shopping, we passed a phone booth only yards from our door. Glancing in, we spotted a billfold, which contained cash (both German and Italian), credit cards and an Italian passport.
Diligently the wallet was turned over to our landlady, Frau Wolff … though not before the standard, universally-recognized fee for getting almost all your important things back was extracted: 200 Deutschmarks.
We thanked Guido profusely, and after arming ourselves with beers and recruiting Bob, we set off for the 40-minute train ride to Kloster Andechs, a Benedictine monastery and religious complex set on a hill in a beautiful rural area, which in summertime would provide sweeping vistas for those drinking from the vantage point of the beer garden that surrounds the buildings on numerous levels.
The brewing is now done in the village below, but the old brewhouse is visible at one end of the indoor drinking area, which comprises several rooms. We barely found space in one of them – the place was jam-packed with locals on a Saturday afternoon – and consumed liters of Doppelbock and Dunkel. Beer as well as food is self-service; the pig’s knuckle that Guido kindly bought me was the approximate size of a volleyball, oozing grease and porcine yummies, and defeating my efforts to finish it.4
Grazi, Guido. We’ll never, ever forget you.
Next: Czech and Slovak beer & Hungarian Bull’s Blood wine (Euro Beer Travel 1995, Part II).
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(1) I first encountered the Mathäser Bierstadt (“Beer City”) in 1987. It felt like the 1950s, or so I imagined. Unfortunately, the beer hall fell victim to modernity in 1996. A few years later the site was transformed into an ultra-modern cinema and entertainment complex. I walked past it in 2004 and bowed in reverence for what used to be. I wrote about the Mathäser at length in 2022:
- A 1987 visit to Munich’s legendary Mathäser Bierstadt, Part One
- A 1987 visit to Munich’s legendary Mathäser Bierstadt, Part Two
(2) Rick “Biggus Dickus” Lang died in 2019 at 62 years of age, George Schroeder in 2016 at 88, and John Dennis in 2021 at 87. George’s dad Vladimír Motyčka is no longer with us, although I don’t have exact information. Rest in peace, fellows, as well as others I may have missed. Thanks for the memories from the bottom of my heart. Those were the best of times.
(3) Obviously the brewery has changed again during the 30 years since, as with the introduction of a new brewhouse. The lagering time remains shorter, not traditional, but to some extent it appears oak vessels have been reintroduced as part of the brewing process. To me, the flavor still comes through. Learn more in this 2018 article.
(4) Conversely, I’ve returned to Bamberg again and again. Many of my fellow Americans came to this conclusion, too, even if I did my best to discourage them. We wouldn’t want this jewel to have Barcelona’s problems with tourists, especially ones with no taste for better beer.
