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In December, 16 North American beer journalists, including myself, embarked on a weeklong beer-tasting tour of Bavaria, Germany. Our mission? To spread the word to people back home that there’s much more to German beer than Beck’s and St. Pauli Girl — that Bavarian beer is right up there with, say, Belgian beer in variety and character.
Will our visit go down in history as the event that planted the seeds of a widespread appreciation here for helles, dunkel, weizenbock, kellerbier, etc.? That remains to be seen. For me, our little road trip was, not just about the beer. It was about bonding with my fellow beer journos, most of whom I previously knew only by their bylines. A special camaraderie grew among us as we rode the Bavarian Beer Culture Tour Bus from town to town, drinking beer morning, noon and night, and trying to stay awake through PowerPoint presentations on decoction mashing and hop exports.
Arriving in Munich, the beer writers rendezvous at the Airbrau, a brewpub in the airport. The bearded, bow-tied man who greets us is our tour guide and colleague, Horst Dornbusch, a German native who plies his beer-writing trade in the U.S. Horst proves admirably demented enough to herd our opinionated, unruly asses around Bavaria for a week.
The first person I meet is Stephen "World of Beer" Beaumont, beer’s ambassador to the wider world of good food. As we share a plate of weisswurst, he notes that if I happen to order the white sausage at an outdoor market, I should do the following in order to blend in with the natives: bite a small piece off one end of the wurst and suck the innards out, discarding the skin. Luckily, I never get a chance to try this out.
At the hotel, I make friends with the other girls on the tour: Boston Globe writer Ann Cortissoz, who will become our connoisseur of beer schnapps, hop liqueur, and other distilled treats; and Jeannine Marois and Marie-Josée Lefebvre, the charming ladies who run Montreal’s Mondial de la Biere festival. Jeannine and Marie-Josée tell me that they are here to scope out selections for the Bavarian beer pavilion they are planning for 2007, and it strikes me that they may have even better jobs than beer journalists do.
That night, there’s a kick-off party at Der Pschorr beer hall, where Hacker-Pschorr helles is served out of a wooden cask. I share a tray of smoked meats with the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of beer publishers, Daniel Bradford of All About Beer and Tom Dalldorf of Celebrator Beer News. Their paths have crossed often in their years of covering the craft beer industry, and they finish one another’s sentences as I referee their acerbic exchanges.
The next day, we board the Beer Culture Tour Bus. This bright blue vehicle painted with glasses of beer elicits amused stares from pedestrians we pass. It is our living room on wheels. We each grab a pair of seats, one to sit in and one to pile with PR material, souvenir mugs, and 6-packs. Remember how the rowdy kids always staked out the back of the bus during class trips? Nothing’s changed. Their ringleader on this trip is "Big Lew" Bryson, whose car-horn laugh rattles the bus windows every few minutes. Their rallying cry is "Prost, baby!"
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