My Beer Year

  In the outdoor beer garden, red-cheeked soccer fans wearing scarves were boisterously preparing to march to the FC Köln (the Köln Football Club) match. Indoors, shards of jewel-toned stained glass, dark wood-paneled walls, old clocks, and dim lighting made me feel like I had entered a church, a place where Sunday afternoon meant worshiping an ale that was considered obscure anywhere but here. In Köln tradition, the servers in the pubs are usually men who wear a very specific uniform: crisp white button-up shirts and long, navy blue aprons. The men are called Köbes, and from the moment I stepped inside, I was trying to get out of their way. The servers moved with a striking efficiency and brusqueness, spinning, twirling, and showboating round metal trays with central handles and holes for holding tall, straight-sided, six-ounce stangen glasses, which translates to “stick” or “rod.” The glasses, which are used only for kölsch, are intentionally small, so imbibers will drink the beer before it warms. Near the front door, men wearing vests over their white shirts poured beer from a barrel into glasses. They moved like efficient machines. On closer inspection, I noticed the barrel’s tap was actually protruding from a metal keg underneath, which made me feel like I’d just tried to pull a handle on a faux drawer. While the brewpub felt weighted with tradition, I also detected performance, as though the pub was just a portrayal of authenticity.

  I was seated at a communal table, and I was alone until two older women sat a few seats down. They were so engrossed in conversation with each other, they seemed oblivious to the room, Köbes, and football fans. But eventually the three of us started chatting. They told me they met as young nurses in Switzerland. One of them went on to marry a German man she met in Israel, and the other married a Frenchman she met in Morocco. Even though the friends parted ways and led separate lives, they made a point to meet and travel together on a regular basis.

  “We never forgot each other,” said the one wearing a bright pink scarf. They both giggled.

  “You remind me of myself forty-five years ago,” she told me. “Sitting alone in a restaurant, writing. I remember it so well.”

  Sitting alone in restaurants and scribbling in a notebook was one of my favorite things to do. I felt a warm connection to these kindred spirits. I asked the friends what I should order.

  “You want to have something from here, something typical?” the woman with glasses and a dark bob asked. “You must get kölsch. You can drink the other beers here, but it is sacrilege.”

  “We had that Paulaner in Bavaria,” the pink-scarfed woman added wistfully. “But when you’re here, you drink kölsch.”

  A spectacled server breezed up to our table and seemed immediately impatient. I ordered a Früh Kölsch, which the menu said was “direkt vom fass,” or on draft. A minute later, the server returned, tossed a paper coaster next to my notebook, plucked a beer from his tray, and offered me my first taste of the city. The beer had shades of that elusive, golden German beer taste I remembered from college. Only now, as an aspiring Cicerone, I couldn’t just enjoy that nostalgic observation. I pushed for more precise words to describe the malt, and I guessed the beer’s International Bitterness Units. Twenty. “Crackery malt, herby, smack of lemon,” I wrote in my notebook. It was one of those moments when I felt not only how my perception of beer had changed, but how I’d changed. In nearly two decades, I’d gone from American girl drinking to get drunk to American woman drinking in the pursuit of knowledge, a different type of pleasure.

  The women had also recommended trying what the English menu called “smoked minced meat sausage made of roughly meat.” The plate of food arrived in a glorious display of everything I dreamed of when I thought about eating in Deutschland: a fat sausage arching off the edges of the plate, a smooth smear of mashed potatoes, and a meat-flecked tangle of tangy kraut. This was the German stamp in my passport.

  Kölsch etiquette goes like this: when you finish a beer, the server automatically brings another one and makes a tick on your coaster. When you’re ready for the check, the ticks are tallied. To signal you don’t want another beer, place the coaster on top of your empty glass like a lid. But be warned. If you forget to give the signal, or even hesitate for longer than thirty seconds, you will find yourself presented with another small, low-alcohol beer that costs less than two euros. At that point, you may think, It’s just a little beer and it’s already here. I might as well drink it. Next thing you know, you’ve been in Köln for two weeks and have become a top supporter of the FC Köln, otherwise known as the Billy Goats. Kölsch service is an engrained tradition. One Früh advertisement showed an empty glass with a coaster on top. Du sollst nicht lügen, it read. Don’t lie. The next night, I’d visit Gaffel, another of the city’s large kölsch brewers. There, my server would chug a glass of kölsch while standing next to my table, before wiping his mouth with his sleeve and showing the American man at my table his tongue piercing. Then, he balanced a full beer on top of the coaster I’d placed on my empty glass. So much for tradition.

  After my meal at Früh, I decided to climb one of the cathedral’s towers to reach a viewing area three hundred feet above the ground, which promised views of the city and the murky Rhine. To get there, I had to walk up 533 well-worn stone steps, an impressive corkscrew pointed toward God. Hundreds of tourists packed the stairwell, so I took deep breaths and consciously avoided thinking about the height I was gaining and the smallness of the space we all occupied. On the way up, I ran my right hand along a cold, rounded stone wall. On the way down, I appreciated an actual railing.

  Later, I descended into the cathedral’s vaults. Between ominous stone walls, which were the building’s foundation, glass cases separated visitors from antiquities bathed in dazzling light. I took in elaborate tapestries, glittering robes, staffs adorned with chunks of jewels, and slivers of saints’ bones wrapped in gauze. The whole time, I was searching for one thing: evidence of beer. My world had become a place where beer was not just a drink delivered in stangen glasses but something interwoven with religion, architecture, and mythology. In Europe I’d started to view beer as a thread through human history. Instead of creating access to new territory, like a ribbon of fresh asphalt, beer was a cobblestone street worn smooth by generations of feet and bicycle tires. It wasn’t that European brewers were so bound to tradition they weren’t expressing themselves through their recipes—the brewers I met weren’t above creating new beers, equipment, or brewing techniques—but they brewed as though they didn’t have anything to prove. They had history on their side. Even if, in these hallowed halls, the fat-fingered, bejeweled, gold-threaded Catholic power players chose to fill their chalices and goblets with fermented grapes, I knew beer had been here. Beer had been everywhere.

  On my final evening in Köln, I lingered in my hotel room for as long as I could stand, hoping to catch Tony and Oscar on Skype. Our attempts at daily Skype calls were falling through with an increasing frequency during the past few days. When the two of them were getting ready for the day, eating dinner, or doing bedtime rituals, I was in places without WiFi. I was starting to feel disconnected from my little family in North America. The Skype app bleeped and bleeped. No answer. So I made a video of the train station, which I could see from the hotel window, then looked into my phone and told Oscar I’d be coming home soon. I sent the video to Tony, then I bundled up and headed back out into the city.

  After drinking nothing but kölsch since I arrived, I longed for some variety. That’s how I ended up sitting on a bar stool next to Peter Esser, a Köln brewer known for treating Reinheitsgebot as a suggestion—for other people. Peter is the owner and brewmaster of one of the city’s smallest breweries, Braustelle, a brewpub in an emerging artists’ quarter. Brandon Evans, the brewing intern at Cantillon, said he always heads straight to Braustelle when visiting Köln, which is how I heard of the place. With a chalkboard beer menu, brew kettles in the corner, and a lack of any blue-smocked servers, the brewpub felt more Portland than Köln. In fact, the brewery might be better known in Portland. Am
erican craft beer lovers might not recognize the name Braustelle, but many of them will know Freigeist Bierkultur, a gypsy brewing label created by Peter and a young brewer named Sebastian Sauer. Freigeist beers, some of which are brewed on-site, have a distinctive white ghost on the label, and the name translates to “freethinker” or “free spirit.”

  Peter told me he started out as a homebrewer before he enrolled in a brewing school. After he graduated, he brewed at a handful of German breweries before opening Braustelle in 2010, when he decided to push the boundaries of tradition by reviving old beer styles using interesting, modern ingredients. Not much of what he wanted to brew conformed to the Germany Purity Law, so Peter decided to label his beers “beverages with alcohol.” Without calling his beers “beer,” Peter wasn’t breaking any laws.

  Braustelle represents a small but growing craft beer movement in Germany. The country hasn’t escaped the influence of U.S. brewers, an effect that’s evident everywhere from Italy to Japan. But in Germany, a place of longstanding beer traditions, the craft scene presents some interesting possibilities. For one, craft beer can excite younger generations of drinkers, who seem to have slowly abandoned beer, the drink of their grandparents, for cocktails and sport drinks. In 1991 the average German drank about thirty-seven gallons of beer a year. In 2014 that number fell to twenty-six gallons a year, about the same as the American average.

  Some rule breakers from Freigeist and Braustelle include a gose made with oysters, a lambic-style beer fermented with cherry blossoms, and a lichtenhainer, a traditional eastern German tart, smoked-wheat beer. As Peter and I talked, I drank the Pink Panther, a vibrantly pink ale brewed with hibiscus flowers. Even though the beer seemed a bit watery, it was a refreshing dose of punk rock in a city of smooth jazz.

  “I don’t care about styles,” Peter told me, which made him sound more Belgian than German. For example, he said in choppy English, once he wanted to create a strong black beer with smoky characteristics. He didn’t care how it would be categorized. He liked to begin with a single ingredient and build a recipe around it. “The idea is in the head, the taste, and ingredients,” he explained. “You do it for your own.”

  Next, we shared a bottle of Raqui, a beer Peter told me was made with what he thought were “sour apples” in English. He wrote the German word quitte in my notebook, which I later found out means “quince.”

  “I think I like this beer,” Peter said, smiling. I liked it, too. Its bracing tartness showed off whispers of hay and dried grass.

  I was amused to discover Braustelle brews the only altbier in Köln, as well as its own version of kölsch. Of course, Peter’s interpretation doesn’t conform to the rules of the Kölsch Konvention; it is unfiltered, a pre-Konvention practice, which actually makes the beer more traditional. In the glass, Peter’s kölsch was cloudy and dried-ginkgo-leaf yellow, which reminded me of something Alan Taylor told me about the evolution of pilsners, the foundation of modern German brewing traditions (outside of Köln). He said pilsners could have only come about in the industrial revolution, when people could see their beer for the first time; affordable glassware had just become available.

  “You could see dark, chunky stuff floating around in your beer that you’d really never thought about,” Alan said. “Or you could look at a brilliant golden beer with a beautiful white frothy head.” People began to demand beautiful beer. “These days, people take all these pictures of their food,” Alan continued. “This was the first picture of beer. It was eye candy.”

  Peter showed me around the brewery, some of which was directly underneath the pub, in a cramped basement. One room had metal doors that made me feel like I was on the set of Das Boot. ACHTUNG UV-STRAHLUNG! a sign read. It was a warning about UV light, which helped kill bacteria and flies in the fermentation room. A handful of barrels made up the “sour room,” which I imagined was an attraction during the on-site brewing seminars Peter offered to the public. After he shows tour attendees how he brews and then offers them samples of beer, inevitably, the discussion turns to the Reinheitsgebot.

  “Most people think it’s a good thing,” he said. “It’s different to say something against it.”

  As if to offset his nonconformist beers, Peter recommended that, before I catch my train back to Brussels, I stop at Päffgen, a Köln brewery founded in 1883. There, he said, the kölsch had low carbonation, good foam, and more malt. It was “not like water.” The next morning, I smelled the malty sweetness of beer brewing long before I saw the door to Päffgen, which was tucked into a street of high-end shops that hadn’t yet opened for the day. Uwe Wisskirchen, brewmaster at Päffgen had a strong handshake and spoke very little English, but he kindly showed me around the brewery. “More work and more time,” he said, “but the beer tastes better.” Most of the time, I didn’t know what he was saying, and the language barrier was so thick, at one point, he drew a diagram of something that looked like a rainbow spilling into a tube. Weigel-Schnellabläuterung, he wrote. In the fermentation room, pillows of foam in tall, open-topped fermenters bubbled and burped, which caused foam to splat onto the floor every few seconds. The spillage would have seemed wild and un-German were it not for Uwe’s calm demeanor and fact that we were surrounded by gleaming equipment.

  Even though they brewed every batch using the same 130-year-old recipe, he said, each brew was slightly different. “There’s change, variation,” he said. “This is a small house brewery. We make hand-crafted beer.”

  I asked him what he thought of Peter.

  “Peter and I are good friends,” he said.

  “You can still be friends even though he’s breaking the law?” I hoped he’d detect my sarcasm. He laughed.

  “Yes, it’s OK,” he said. “A little rock ’n’ roll.”

  In less than forty-eight hours, I would step off a plane and see Tony and Oscar, a moment I was imagining more frequently, especially when I sat down to eat a meal by myself. I couldn’t wait to be home. I longed to feel Oscar’s silky round cheek against mine when we hugged, and I couldn’t wait to kiss Tony and feel his stubble on my face, a gentle rub of masculinity that seemed very far away. I was still taking pictures of Oscar’s little car, everywhere from bakeries to brewpubs, but the photos felt lifeless. The car was just a metal hull; it had been too long since Oscar touched it. But what was more difficult to admit, because it felt like a betrayal, was that part of me didn’t want to go home. I regretted I had to leave a beer-rich country I’d only just begun to explore. I wouldn’t have the chance to taste a fresh doppelbock in Munich or a yeasty hefeweizen brewed by Benedictine monks in Andechs. Not this time, anyway.

  JUDGMENT DAY

  In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are a few.

  —SHUNRYU SUZUKI

  I PRESSED THROUGH the revolving door and stepped into the lush, clean air of Portland in March. In the pickup lane at the airport, I saw a familiar set of bike racks approaching, the top rails of a familiar car. Behind a harsh white glare on the front windshield, Tony grinned, revealing the charming gap between his front teeth. In the back seat, Oscar looked like a giant, his long legs spilling out of his car seat, which pinned him down like Gulliver on Lilliput. Tony hopped out, kissed me, and threw my bag in the back.

  “He’s asleep,” he said. “I tried to keep him awake, but we had to keep circling while we waited for you to land.”

  When I got into the front seat, I turned and squeezed Oscar’s knee. “Sunshine, I’m home!”

  He emitted a tiny snore. I sighed.

  At home, we had our full reunion, which included chicken soup Tony made, the perfect antidote to a long day of travel that had began with rolling my bag from Hélène and Emilien’s apartment to a bus station before the sun rose. I was too tired to drink a beer, so instead I carefully unrolled the sweaters and pants padding more than a dozen bottles of Belgian beer. (Sarah taught me the packing technique the night before she flew home.) None of the bottles had broken or leaked.
One at a time, I handed them to Tony.

  “Thank you,” I said, after he carefully set the beers on the kitchen table in a bowling pin formation. Oscar was in another room making vroom-vroom sounds.

  “No, thank you,” he replied and hugged me from behind. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

  “Was it hard?” I asked. “Taking care of Oscar all those days by yourself?”

  “Not really,” Tony said stoically, “but I never want to do another bedtime.” I couldn’t imagine getting Oscar into bed—a drawn out process that often included tears—thirteen times in a row. I promised to take more than my share of bedtimes in the coming weeks.

  For the next few days, I felt disoriented and exhausted. One night at the dinner table, I noticed Tony and Oscar were staring at me, waiting for me to respond to something I hadn’t heard them say. I’d been thinking about which flashcards I would make while Tony cleaned up the dinner dishes. That night, I woke up at two o’clock and stared at the light coming in through the blinds in the bedroom. Heat emanated from Tony, who was sleeping soundly next to me. The Cicerone exam was just four weeks away, and I knew I wasn’t ready. I desperately wanted more time. If only I could have another six months, I thought. Instead of riding my bike to work, which made me feel invigorated and relaxed, I started taking the train so I could review flashcards—the ones I’d barely touched during my trip. Tony drove Oscar to and from school so I’d have extra time to study.

  When friends and co-workers asked me if I felt ready to take the test, I tried not to snap at them. Of course I wasn’t ready. Megan Flynn, who’d taken the Cicerone exam a few months earlier, sent me encouraging text messages. “Study the beer styles,” she admonished. “Beer styles, beer styles, beer styles.” But I hadn’t even made flashcards yet for at least a dozen styles; I’d been studying other things.