{"id":1317,"date":"2019-03-27T04:09:47","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T04:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsnewsforyou.com\/?p=1317"},"modified":"2019-03-27T04:09:47","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T04:09:47","slug":"debating-the-virtues-or-failings-of-german-style-beer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=1317","title":{"rendered":"Debating The Virtues (Or Failings) Of German Style Beer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beer is, without question, the most popular alcoholic\u00a0drink in the world. Lager is, likewise, the most popular style of beer. But are popular things always good? Obviously not; or else Ed Sheeran would be \u201cthe best\u201d in British music. Then again, some popular things are<\/em> good:\u00a0Get Out<\/em> is the number one movie at the box office right now. That\u2019s pretty awesome.<\/p>\n

We decided to have a debate. Is lager a legit beer style? We enlisted two experts\u2014amateur brewer and noted beverage curmudgeon\u00a0Chris Chafin and GOODFood Editor Maxwell Williams\u2014to a drunken-style word battle.<\/p>\n

Do not drink German beer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chris Chafin: <\/strong>If you have a friend who is an aspiring beer snob, one thing they probably like to talk about is German beer. Maybe they\u2019re always bugging you to go to the biergarten that just opened in town. It\u2019s got pretzels and spaetzle and a bunch of legendary German brews.<\/p>\n

While you should definitely take a trip to that\u00a0biergarten\u2014because both pretzels and spaetzle are some of the best food on the planet\u2014I am here to tell you that German beer is, in fact, terrible.\u00a0People only think it\u2019s good because they misunderstand history.<\/p>\n

The main reason that people think beer from Germany is better than that of anywhere else is because of the country\u2019s 500-year-old beer purity laws, or the Reinheitsgebot. These are\u00a0a series of regulations on beer ingredients, the most famous of which was adopted in Bavaria in 1516. These laws stated, very simply, that beer could be made of water, barley, and hops. If you sold beer with any other ingredients, it would be confiscated and destroyed. It\u2019s like if Anthony Bourdain got to go into bad restaurants and throw their truffle mac and cheese in the garbage. Pretty metal.\u00a0Some form of these laws is still enforced\u00a0today.<\/p>\n

While this wasn\u2019t literally the world\u2019s first food safety law, as some Germans like to claim, it was a guarantee that German beer would be high quality and reliable at a time when a lot of other food wasn\u2019t. Germany has been using it as a marketing tool for the hundreds of years since.<\/p>\n

Some scholars argue that these laws weren\u2019t passed to protect beer in the first place, but rather to make sure that grains like rye and wheat would be used to make bread instead of beer.<\/p>\n

Whatever the intent, the laws had an immediate strangulating effect on German beer culture, which continues to this day. \u201cOur brewing culture was paralyzed,\u201d\u00a0beer sommelier Sylvia Kopp told NPR last year. \u201cAll the innovations that we had in beer was packaging, new sponsoring ideas, a new bottle, so there was little innovation with the product itself.\u201d Regional beers, specialty beers, and varieties that weren\u2019t pilsners all went basically\u00a0<\/span>extinct. Today, all real German beers\u2014beers you might actually find in a regular bar in Germany, as well as the imports you see\u2014are almost exclusively low-alcohol pilsners. They have\u00a0passed as good beer for a very<\/em> long time.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to overstate just how young the revolution in styles and flavors of beer is. Brooklyn Brewery opened in 1987, when its flagship beer (which is pretty mild) was considered an insanely outr\u00e9 product. I once interviewed its founder, Steve Hindy, who told me that people would take a sip of it and spit it out, because they\u2019d been conditioned to expect very little flavor from decades of drinking mainstream U.S.\u00a0beers. Those beers\u2014Budweiser, Coors, Busch, and others\u2014were largely inspired by German beers, and in many cases founded by German immigrants.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s obviously been a lot of changes in beer culture in the decades since. Today, the things I want from beer are: a strong flavor and a reasonable alcohol content. Beer is very filling and kind of expensive.\u00a0I\u2019d like to not have four or five in a sitting\u2014maybe just one or two would be\u00a0fine.<\/p>\n

If you enjoy consuming a flavorless liquid in huge quantities, may I suggest switching to water?<\/p>\n

Here is what you get from German beer: a flavorless liquid with no alcohol. Real German beer is usually around 3.5 percent\u00a0alcohol by volume. For comparison, Budweiser is 5 percent ABV\u00a0and smaller craft beers (especially India pale ales) regularly top six to eight\u00a0percent. This is why the primary way to drink German beer is out of a novelty glass bucket in the shape of a boot. This is why they measure beer as often by the length of the glass (those \u201cyards\u201d for which Oktoberfest is famous) as by the actual volume of liquid. You need to consume absolutely gargantuan quantities of it to feel as if you have had any beer at all. That\u2019s kind of gross.<\/p>\n

Maybe this is what you like in beer. If this is the case\u2014if\u00a0you enjoy consuming a bland liquid in huge quantities, may I suggest switching to water? It\u2019s actually good for you, and if you drink a bunch of it in a short amount of time, you\u2019ll be about as buzzed as you\u2019d be from drinking German beer. Instead, buy from small craft breweries in America, which are\u2014in my opinion\u2014producing the best beer in the world today. There are a huge variety of products\u2014all of which are very good.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is basically the opposite of German beers, which have no variety (and are all bad).<\/p>\n

Do not drink German beer.<\/p>\n

Drink German Beer<\/h2>\n

Traveling with friends in the southern reaches of China, we decided to take a bus and walk into Vietnam. My travel companions and I had been waylaid on a bus from Guangzhuo, and the date on our visas to make the crossing was listed as\u00a0the day before. We walked past a man with a large automatic rifle\u00a0and on to the immigration office where there was a several hour-long wait. When we finally reached the front of the line, the Vietnamese border guards said there was no leeway on the visa date, and sent us packing back to China with a stern reprimand. We walked two miles back to the only hostel in town.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s just say it was a long day. And it was sweltering. We wanted nothing more than to collapse on the hostel bed in the safe enclosure\u00a0of a mosquito net. Next door was an internet caf\u00e9, the only one in town, from which we emailed our loved ones before setting up a table outside the convenience store, where we purchased a couple large bottles of lager. They were room temperature\u2014which is how they drink beer in Southern China\u2014but they were light and delicious and more refreshing than a cold glass of water. That night we slept well.\u00a0The next day we moved on to Chengdu to see the pandas. Nearly 15 years later, I still remember that beer.<\/p>\n

This kind of crisp\u00a0refresh is only possible with a German-style brew. India pale ales have earned a reputation in the past dozen or so years as being the microbrew of choice, while German-style lagers have been denigrated to cheap beer status. Budweiser, the great German-American disaster, is best served poured into the\u00a0dirt. Other American canned suds\u2014Busch, Coors\u2014are equally bad.<\/p>\n

But lagers (and the Czech counterpart pilsner, born in the Bohemian city of Pilzn) can be beautiful. They are easier to drink than IPAs, which I sometimes find to be syrupy or too herbal. I can hardly ever drink more than one IPA or pub-style ale. Plus, IPAs give me severe headaches in the morning. With German-style beers, I can drink well into the night, which is what I imagine the M\u00fcnich folks do in their lederhosen and dirndls during the Bavarian Oktoberfest, waking\u00a0up the next morning ready to roll.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not slagging IPAs. They can taste fantastic. But I only really crave them in the wintertime. In the summer or when I\u2019m\u00a0near the equator, like on the Southern Chinese border, lagers and pilsners are undeniably better.<\/p>\n

Lagers are popular around the world. China has a long history with German-style beer. In fact, it was German settlers who founded Tsingtao, one of China\u2019s most popular beers\u2014and definitely their most popular export\u2014in 1903. The best selling beers in Ethiopia (St. George Lager), Italy (Peroni), South Africa (Castle Lager), Thailand (Singha), and South Korea (Hite) are all inspired by lagers\u2014or at least initially, by German brewing styles.<\/p>\n

In the summer or when I\u2019m near the equator, lagers and pilsners are undeniably better<\/p>\n

Plus, there are highly rated pale lagers: New Glarus Brewing Company\u2019s Totally Naked beer has a \u201cworld-class\u201d score of 97 from BeerAdvocate<\/em>\u2019s \u201cThe Bros” (the site\u2019s two founders), and Jack\u2019s Abby Brewing\u2019s Hoponius Union has an \u201coutstanding\u201d score of 94.<\/p>\n

Despite its reputation, German-style lager can be a treat: an easy, no-fuss beverage\u2014particularly on a hot day. I\u2019d dare you to drink more than one IPA on a sunny afternoon, but I\u2019ll be too busy drinking a cool lager and soaking up the sun to care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beer is, without question, the most popular alcoholic\u00a0drink in the world. Lager is, likewise, the most popular style of beer. But are popular things always good? Obviously not; or else Ed Sheeran would be \u201cthe best\u201d in British music. Then again, some popular things are good:\u00a0Get Out is the number one movie at the box…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}