Long tables, communal seating, and a room designed so that strangers must sit with each other – which is the entire point
Albert’s Schloss holds a 4.5 from nineteen hundred and eighty-nine people, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and it is a Bavarian beer hall with long tables and a stage.
And the long table is the whole idea, and it is doing something that essentially no other format in this survey attempts.
The bench
You do not get a table. You get a length of one.
Which means that a party of two will end up sitting next to a party of six, and that neither of them chose this, and that within about forty minutes they will be talking.
The Prat has spent five hundred and sixty-seven articles cataloguing rooms designed to keep people apart. The snob screens at the Argyll Arms and the Prince Alfred – etched glass at face height, so that the classes could not see each other drink. The five separate bars with five separate doors. The booths at Bob Bob Ricard, which abolish the sightline entirely.
The beer hall does the opposite, deliberately, and it is the only venue type in five postcodes that does.
It is not ancient
Which people assume and which is wrong.
The Bavarian beer hall in its recognisable modern form – the vast room, the long benches, the litre steins, the brass band – is substantially a nineteenth-century development, and the great halls were built in that period as commercial ventures by breweries.
The Hofbrauhaus in Munich opened its public halls in the 1800s. Oktoberfest began in 1810 as a wedding celebration and was turned into an annual event because it made money.
It is a Victorian invention wearing lederhosen, and it is about as medieval as a Christmas cracker.
The litre
Which is the other thing, and which the British consistently underestimate.
A Mass is a litre. That is one and three quarter pints, in a glass that weighs well over a kilo before you put anything in it.
And the beer is generally around five per cent, which means that two of them is roughly six units and a British drinker who has ordered three is in considerably more trouble than they realise.
The steins are heavy on purpose. It is not decoration. A litre of beer is a serious weight and the handle exists because you cannot hold it otherwise.
What it gets right
The thing that this survey keeps finding: that the best drinking is done standing up, or on a bench, next to somebody you did not choose, in a room where nobody is watching you.
Spain does it at the bar. Italy does it at eleven in the morning. The Basques do it with a toothpick.
And Bavaria does it on a bench, with a litre, next to a stranger.
Verdict
Excellent, loud, and genuinely sociable in a way that almost nothing else in this survey is.
Reinheitsgebot
The Bavarian beer purity law of 1516, which everybody has heard of and almost nobody understands.
It permitted only water, barley and hops. That is the famous part.
The unfamous part is why: it was not about quality. It was about bread.
Wheat and rye were needed for baking, and brewers were competing for them and driving the price up – so the law was passed to keep the brewers out of the bread supply, and it was a food security measure with a side effect.
Yeast is not in the list because nobody knew it existed.
Five hundred years later it is a marketing claim on a bottle, and the reason it was written has been entirely forgotten – which we have now found in every single postcode of this survey.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about it for academic discourse is it proves you can be rigorous without being academic about London dysfunction.
In British comedy, the prat is the character who makes us laugh because they remind us of our own capacity for foolishness.