German Beer Myths?

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My boss(who is an arsehole) says the best beers in the world are the ones from Germany and they drink their beer warm. He says the beer comes from the cellar where it is cool and then they put a vial of warm water in your glass to warm it up. Is this true? He also says a Pilsner takes almost 10 minutes to draw or you'll have a glass half full of foam. Is this true? And yes a Pilsner is not German
 
no, the Brits are the people who drink warm beer. Actually I don't think anyone drinks beer warm. they just drink it less cold than the average American. I've never heard of anyone warming a beer up with a vial of warm water. As for taking a long time to pour a beer, I think there is some truth to that one, but it depends on the carbonation level. highly carbed beer would foam more, and need to be poured slow.
 
I've read (many years ago) of some beers being warmed on a stove before drinking. same with some meads. but I think your boss is blowing smoke.
 
Been to Germany. A couple of times. Drank lots of beer there. Never seen warm beer or beer that takes 10 minutes to poor.

Not only is your boss an a-hole, but he may also be on crack.
 
I told him I would post these questions on the forum and I would let him know what I found out. Think I'll tell him, "nobody responded"
 
It used to be that beers took that long to pour in Germany. They had the CO2 up pretty high on the taps. There was a joke that it took 7 minutes to pour a beer that involved Helmut Kohl, Ron Reagan, and Maggie Thatcher. However, this has changed and there are very few bars that pour pilsners in the traditional way with a high CO2. They are pouring at more US levels of CO2, so can pull a beer in a single or a couple of draws.

Anyone that "heats up" their beer is nuts. I've seen Germans put ice in beer but that drew stares of distain. I cannot even imagine the venom that would come from warming a beer.
 
When I lived in Germany, I never drank warm beer. Except for one year, Licher had a "Christmas beer" that was like a thick doppleback. It wasn't warm, exactly, but more of a warmer cellar temperature. I didn't care for it, but I tried it. I was pretty young then, and don't really recall the particulars of that.

Otherwise, the beers are cold. Pilsner is a wonderful German beer, and there is a nice version that is more Czech called "Bohemian pilsner". They are very similar, with the BoPils being a little "spicier" from saaz hops.

I never spent more than a couple of minutes waiting for a beer, and there wasn't excessive foaming at all. Germans do know how to do beer, you know!

I learned how to drink beer in Germany. All throughout the countryside there were microbreweries supplying the gasthauses. You generally had two choices- "pilsner" or "export". The pilsners were firmly bitter and the exports were less so. When I came to the US, the beer options surprised me as there weren't microbreweries or little places with good beer.

I had cellar temperature beers when I visited England, but even so most beers were cold and not "warm".

I've never actually heard a European talk about warm beer- only those in North American who tell it as if they know what they are talking about. :D
 
My boss(who is an arsehole) says the best beers in the world are the ones from Germany and they drink their beer warm. He says the beer comes from the cellar where it is cool and then they put a vial of warm water in your glass to warm it up. Is this true? He also says a Pilsner takes almost 10 minutes to draw or you'll have a glass half full of foam. Is this true? And yes a Pilsner is not German

I've drank beer all over, including many whistle stops in Germany. No warm beer.

Pils comes from Czechoslovakia, but the germans made if famous.
 
Yeah, I'd venture to say that your boss is full of it. I lived in Germany for a few years, and never heard of, or saw them warming their beer before drinking it. Now, they do have a holiday wine that they serve warm (at least in Bavaria) called Gluwein, and it's very good (the wife and I make it during the holidays). As far as taking a long time to pour a Pilsner, again, that's untrue. I've seen them pour pilsner from the tap, and it doesn't take any longer than most other styles. I'd say that your A hole boss is taking what he's heard other people say, and using that as the basis for his completely un-informed nonsense.
 
My boss(who is an arsehole) says the best beers in the world are the ones from Germany and they drink their beer warm. He says the beer comes from the cellar where it is cool and then they put a vial of warm water in your glass to warm it up. Is this true? He also says a Pilsner takes almost 10 minutes to draw or you'll have a glass half full of foam. Is this true? And yes a Pilsner is not German

many people do drink their beer what we consider warm, around 52 degrees. your boss is croaking smack and needs to stop shalking tit... that 52 is cellar temps in cooler places. as for the 10 minutes to pour a pils, it may seem like that when you're drunk and thirsty. there is a german pilsner ( 2A )
 
There are some places in Germany especially where beer is heated up and served warm. It's not common but from what I understand it is prevalent in some locations.

I'm going to try and find an article on it but no promises.

Edit: not saying your boss knows any of this obviously he is probably just repeating the old stereotypes of European hot beer.
 
I think this whole warm beer fallacy started when Americans that were used to drinking very cold beer in frosted mugs travelled. When they drank a beer served at a proper temperature, they considered it warm. Which in relation the frozen stuff they were used to seemed like warm beer.

I keep my beer fridge at 45 degrees and there are certain styles that I pull out and let warm up a little more. Beeer actually has flavor. Frozen cold beer has no flavor.
 
I hate to beat a dead horse, but I live in Germany and none of that is true. Kudos for finding a way to stick it to your boss by posting this.
 
Guiness in Ireland is the longest pulling and warmest beer I ever had and by warmest I mean.... well, yeah, you know...

Watching the Guiness pour was a really meditative experience. Fantastic stuff.
 
thood6 said:
http://kitchentablepolitic.blogspot.com/2012/01/hot-mulled-beer.html?m=1

Here is one example of heating beer. A tradition in Poland and in some parts of Germany. There is an area where they put heaters in beer before they serve other certain types of beer as well.

Again, not extremely common and your boss was still talking our his rear end but it does happen.

Yea, but this is more like Glühwein, which someone said earlier.

You would never drink white wine hot, but in the case of white Glühwein, which is spiced and heated just like the beer in the article, you do. I'm guessing that this is a seasonal thing.

I'm guessing that the "warm" is coming from cellar temps which Kellerbier and like styles are stored and served at.

I asked my German wife about warm beer a few years back and she looked at me like, "What the hell is wrong with you?!?!" :)
 
As a German I can confirm that warm beer is not a common thing (never even seen one anywhere) and pilsner only takes 10 minutes to be poured if you have it poured by an armless person.

You should try make your own Glühwein though. Nothing beats the cold better than that!
 
I have been living in Germany for a couple years and to be honest, I'm not that impressed. Most restaurants, bars and stores only carry pilsners or bavarian wheat beers. I'm not a huge fan of either of those styles. I've had some bocks, keller biers, and fest biers also but I'll take an American pale/IPA, Belgian wit/blonde, or English bitter over a German beer any day. Of course, this is all subjective so your boss is free to call whatever beer he wants the best. Maybe you can get some recommendations from your boss for me. :mug:
 
Lived years ago in Nuremberg area and lived above a Gasthaus. "Warm" beer was usually bottled beer that was just pulled out of the cases that were on the floor behind the bar, and was mostly asked for by "older" folks. Need to remember also that most places don't have forced heating so floor temps are a bit cooler than in US
 
Born, raised and residing in Germany, I have to add that there is some truth to those myths.

One, German houses typically have cellars and a few German kitchens only very recently started getting fridges the size of American fridges. The six pack is also a very recent thing, the most common way of buying beer is a case of 24 0.5l bottles, which then are stored in the cellar. People may keep a hand full of bottles in the fridge, but very often they will just drink it at cellar temperatures - mine is at 10C/50F right now, which is not too bad when you have room temperatures of 22C/72F and your beer is not too thin. If 50F is warm to you*, then yes, we do drink warm beer at home. Bars typically have refrigerated kegs or a fridge with 0.33l bottles, in almost all places where you pay for beer you will get it cold enough to get condensation on your glass.

The 7 minute Pilsner thing gets repeated and repeated and in my opinion, it's how long it takes a bad bartender: when you draw from a high pressure tap into a long thin Pils glass, you'll end up with a glass full of foam if you're not paying attention. Then you have to wait for the foam to settle, shoot in some more from the high pressure tap, wait again, repeat until you about 7 minutes later you have a full glass with a pretty solid head and very little carbonation. I guess some people like it that way, since the head does look like it does on TV, but to me it tastes stale.

* http://www.ratebeer.com/Story.asp?StoryID=479
 
well after reading all your posts....it looks like he is somewhat right. He said 10 minutes and I have read here(twice)it can take 7 minutes. 52 degrees to me is "warm" beer.

Is there a Hoffenbrau beer there? He said it was the best

and yes yes is definetly an *******, once an a-hole, always an a-hole
 
I can assure you that in most good places, it will not take 7 minutes for a Pilsner. It's just a thing that "experts" claim. So it is a German myth about beer, and not a myth about German beer.
 
My wife's grandpa spent some time in Germany during WWII and he came back and started keeping his beer under the sink. At that time it was not unusual for beer to be kind of warm and that's how he got used to it. He liked the "dunkel".

He would still have the occasional cold one at home, but was just as happy to have a warm one.

I think that times have changed and fewer Germans prefer their beer warm now. Also the beer has changed a bit over the years as it has here. If I had some $$ I'd be very interested in going over there and sampling a bunch of their stuff form the smaller breweries. Even if it was cellar temp.
 
I think that you have to look at the temp as a relative thing. What might be warm to us is cold to them. But I also think times are changing for the Germans and they are cooling the beer down more.

I was stationed in Mainz for a couple of years back in the 80's and back then if you got a beer in a bar or restaurant it was cold. But also if you had dinner with a family odds were the beer was served out of a cellar and much warmer. Quite often even now I will go into my cellar and get a beer to drink that has not seen a fridge and drink it at 50 to 55 degrees.

I am not a fan of wine. Matter of fact if I never drink a wine again I would be fine except for that hot spiced wine the Germans made. Man that was some right tasty good stuff.
 
Just a lil fyi about slovaks/czechs. It's only called Czechosolvakia when they're overrun by another country,like russia. Otherwise,as now,they're The Czech Republic,& The Republic of Slovakia. I've been aware of this since I was little,because we have many cousins in Bratislava,Slovakia,which is the capitol city of Slovakia. It's also about an hour away by train from Vienna,Austria. Interesting to me is that that's mom's side of the family,where granpa was a Sudeten(spl?) German. It's pop's side for our sirname that's from Upper Bavaria. I'd def love to get over there someday. I'd like to see where my ancestor's grandpa lived,as he was a warlord or other that got some 3 counties of land in WV deeded to him & his sons. Our mountain sits in the middle of it. He was born in 1600,died in 1684. That's as far back as I've ever traced. I always wondered if he had a castle & all that stuff. Too bad they didn't save anything for us that I'm aware of...like a style of beer maybe?...
 
I was stationed in Mainz for a couple of years back in the 80's.

(Off Topic) I was stationed in Wackernheim (McCully Barracks)(outside Mainz) from July 4, 83 through December 26, 84.
(Working my way back to topic) I spent a lot of my off time at Gertie's Gasthaus. (From what I remember after a few Alts) The beer was served at cellar temps (about 50-55) and usually took a couple of minutes to pour (first pour, wait for the foam, then top it off). I don't ever remember a "warm" beer, even during the outdoor festivals. (of course after all that German beer, I don't have a right to remember anything :tank: )
 
Was stationed in Aschaffenburg in the 70's, the Heylands brewery and an apfelcorn distillery was right next door to my barracks.
The beer was always cold.
The only slow pours I remember was Hefe, as most were poured from the bottle and there was a technique to the pour to keep from getting a glass of foam. took a minute or two
 
My boss(who is an arsehole) says the best beers in the world are the ones from Germany and they drink their beer warm. He says the beer comes from the cellar where it is cool and then they put a vial of warm water in your glass to warm it up. Is this true? He also says a Pilsner takes almost 10 minutes to draw or you'll have a glass half full of foam. Is this true? And yes a Pilsner is not German

Um, there are LOTS of German pilsners.
 
Was stationed in Aschaffenburg in the 70's, the Heylands brewery and an apfelcorn distillery was right next door to my barracks.
The beer was always cold.
The only slow pours I remember was Hefe, as most were poured from the bottle and there was a technique to the pour to keep from getting a glass of foam. took a minute or two

Oh, I forgot all about apfelkorn! I remember loving it as an after dinner drink.

The apple juice in Germany was another treat- it tastes like Americans call "cider".
 
PackerfaninSanDiego said:
My boss(who is an arsehole) says the best beers in the world are the ones from Germany and they drink their beer warm. He says the beer comes from the cellar where it is cool and then they put a vial of warm water in your glass to warm it up. Is this true? He also says a Pilsner takes almost 10 minutes to draw or you'll have a glass half full of foam. Is this true? And yes a Pilsner is not German

Yes, your boss is an arsehole, having lived in Germany for several years I can tell you that it's all bollocks! However, I did work with some Turks in Bavaria, who used to warm their bottles of beer on the radiator when we were working outdoors (building sites) in -10 to -15 degrees C. They claimed it was good for the stomach:)
 
Yes, your boss is an arsehole, having lived in Germany for several years I can tell you that it's all bollocks! However, I did work with some Turks in Bavaria, who used to warm their bottles of beer on the radiator when we were working outdoors (building sites) in -10 to -15 degrees C. They claimed it was good for the stomach:)

In china they drink hot water everywhere. Almost impossible to get a glass of icewater. They drink it hot for the same reason, good for the stomach. I think it's really to ensure the bacteria are killed. In the country they pour hot water over the chopsticks before they use them... same reason, sanitation.
 

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