It’s funny, a bunch of us were just talking about this at our last homebrew club meeting. This is going to be long, just putting that out in advance.
One of our club guys suggested a few months ago that we should have a competition and challenged us all to brew a German Pils. Our local examples are Victory Prima Pils and Troegs Sunshine Pils, both very good beers. When it came to this meeting and everybody was supposed to bring their beers, only 3 of us had brewed it. So it ended up not being a competition per se, but we poured and talked about the beers.
Then as guys will do, especially after a couple beers, we went off and started talking about German beers and how good they were and how for many of us a German beer was one of or the first beer we ever enjoyed.
I grew up in Phila. Our local breweries when I was a kid were pretty much Schmidt’s and Ortliebs. I lived within an easy walk, maybe a mile from the Schmidt’s brewery. Nobody we knew drank Schmidt’s. Everybody said it was headache beer, you always got a headache from it. My best friend’s father bought Ortlieb’s in bottles. My dad always bought Carling Black Label, whether it was because it was cheap or because he liked it - I don’t know. But my dad worked for a can company in Phila that made cans for soda companies like Canada Dry and a bunch of other things, so he always bought beer in cans.
We were like 15 and we would take bottles or cans every so often and hope they never noticed. We would drink them but never really liked them. Then one of my other friend’s dads got a case of St. Pauli Girl and we got hold of a couple of those. We’re talking probably 1977. And we just couldn’t believe how good that beer was, how it was SO different. That was the first for me.
When I got to drinking age, I bought alot of St. Pauli Girl. Later I found Becks was pretty much the same thing at the time. Then I found even cheaper German beers like Warsteiner were still great and better than most American beers we’d had at the time.
From the time I was a kid I never liked Budweiser. As a young man I refused to drink Budweiser even when it was free at parties. I did like other products they made like Busch which was somehow different and at the time Michelob which was the premium beer in a fancy bottle with a gold foil top. I discovered though that I liked most of what Miller made better than I liked most of what AB made. I liked High Life back then and I still buy it today.
I think now its because Budweiser uses rice where the others use corn and I prefer the corn to the rice. Then we’d try stuff like Old Milwaukee which wasn’t terrible and then that was made by Strohs so of course we’d try Strohs.
But nothing was as good as those German beers.
Later we had a restaurant here called Bennigans that had a program where you could get to try 100 beers from around the world. You signed up and got a card and after you tried 100 beers they gave you a gold pint glass. I got 3 of them. But I think that was where I did alot of exploring beer and learning about beer and different beer styles from different places and that program paved the way for me to become a homebrewer and start brewing.
But there is something to this idea of German beers being so different and so good. Some of it in part is probably inherent to larger scale brewing - they don’t syphon beer between tanks with a racking cane and tubing. They transfer in what is thought of as a closed transfer. Something like that could be in line with low oxygen but if there is a pump involved, does a pump not also introduce oxygen? Germany is also a much older country than the US. I saw this over and over again when I was in the navy, other countries we’d visit. Rome and the Collesium and the Vatican. Mexico and the Mayan pyramids. The narrow and crooked streets of pretty much any place in Europe.
It all speaks to how young of a country we are comparatively. They’ve just been doing it so much longer. And Germany never had Prohibition where their breweries were all shut down for 15 or 18 years or whatever it was. Plus they have strict laws around brewing where they don’t use corn or rice or a number of things our breweries do. They are not making hazy beers on purpose either.
Now all that said, I still go in cycles - there are times I want to brew and drink American style beers, there are times I want to brew and drink British style beers and mostly I just buy German beer.
) HTH
