Biergartens

For years I've heard the German term biergarten and assumed that garten must have a broader meaning than the English term garden. Coming from a place with open container laws and an almost neurotic anxiety about where open drinking can and cannot occur, I thought surely Germans wouldn't allow alcohol consumption in a setting that sounds synonymous with park. Yet that's exactly what they do.

 My friend and coworker Paul is from Munich. He tells me the biergartens can be cliquish. The goal is what the Germans call Gemütlichkeit, a place or feeling of warmth and friendliness. This is the original place where everybody knows your name. It looks downright civilized. There’s no ear splitting music, no drunk twenty year olds crashing into each other and tossing back Jell-O shots. No bouncer keeping out The Ugly People™.

In fact, there’s no bouncer at all. Nor is there a barrier separating the drinkers from the non-drinkers. I can’t tell you if that’s true of all the dozens of biergartens in Munich. The biergarten in the photo is literally in the center of a public park called the Englischer Garten. The other biergarten I visited is the Viktualienmarkt, an open public square a block off the town center, the Marienplatz.

Every biergarten has copious trees, even more tables, places to buy beer, and places to buy food. Some people bring their own food because that’s allowed. I suppose it’s also possible to bring your own beer as well, but nobody seems to be doing that.

Most of the beer steins are glass instead of the traditional ornate covered steins that everyone associates with Bavaria. According to a tour guide, clear glass is required by law. About a century or so back, beer sellers were using the fact of dark covered steins to cheat customers by underfilling and charging the same price. Glass lets customers see exactly how much they’re getting for their money. Bier steins are a full lite. The glass in the photo is typical of the typical biergarten stein around here, it's actually one from the Hofbrauhaus. It’s 2.11 pints, in case you were wondering. Beer sellers keep them from wandering off by charging a stein deposit with the beer purchase, for which the buyer is given a metal token or ticket.

I wish I had better pictures of all of this. No matter how many pictures I take on a trip, inevitably, when I start processing them, I find there’s something I missed, something I didn’t get enough of. For Munich, biergarten’s are what I missed.