Augustiner
I’ve mentioned it here and here, but I have always enjoyed Augustiner’s beers. For those of you who have spent any time in Munich, you’ll know that Augustiner is not nearly as well represented across the city as Paulaner, Löwenbräu and Spaten, but when you get the chance to order one, do (preferably an Edelstoff, don’t ask, just order it). Like most Munich beers, the traditional Augustiner is a Munich Helles, so it’s neither overly hoppy nor heavily malted, but it’s a crisp, refreshing and eminently drinkable beer.
So it was that I ended up at one of the Augustiner tents during my recent trip to the Oktoberfest. As I quaffed my liter of beer, I noticed the beer was in fact quite tasty. Now, with all due respect to Munich’s favorite festival, it is typically somewhat of a triumph of quantity over quality, so I didn’t really expect to be wowed by the beer. In any event, I was, and I like to think that it’s because I stumbled across the only remaining tent at the Oktoberfest which still serves beer out of wooden kegs rather than the more convenience stainless steel.
I was told this interesting little factoid by my tablemate, a sometime Augustiner employee, before his lips and a good part of his tongue were sucked out of his face by a busty young lass out of Michigan. But I digress. Sure enough, we were sitting right across from the beer taps, and there stood a large wooden cask, behind which were two burly men and a somewhat complex system of ramps to get the thing into place. My lipless neighbor also told me that they go through 12 of those casks in an hour during the Oktoberfest, which I can certainly believe, and that they are a bitch to tap properly.
In any event, whether those last facts are correct or not, kudos to Manfred Vollmer, the master of Augustiner’s Festhalle, for retaining good beer and tradition at the modern Oktoberfest.
photo from Oktoberfest.de
Tags: augustiner, beer, beers, helles, munich, oktoberfest, paulaner, spaten, vollmer, wooden_cask, wooden_kegs
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