The Difference Between Beer and Wine, Explained by an Englishman Traveling Through Germany

When 19-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from Holland to Constantinople in 1933, the first part of his journey took him from beer country (Düsseldorf, Cologne) to wine country (Coblenz, Stuttgart) and back to beer country again. Wine country was his decided preference. The “grey mastodonic mugs” and “boisterous and pace-forcing black-letter hortatations” on the walls of the beer-halls (e.g., the poster in Goch that proclaimed  Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib und Gesang, Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang! ) made him melancholy, compared with the glittering wine glasses and finer beverages of Coblenz . Also, beer country had more Nazis.

So if his absolutely side-splitting description of the Munich Hofbräuhaus (pictured) in the travel book  A Time of Gifts   seems uncharitable, just remember how dismayed he was to be in beer territory once again:

One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost nonstop eating — meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment — can wreak on the human frame. Intestine strife and the ceaseless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.

The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobby scalps. Except when five o’clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches’ eggs reflected the lamplight.

The youngest of this group, resembling a matinee idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. 

Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow. They might have been competing with stopwatches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps.

Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and bretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies always came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with schweinebraten, potatoes, sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in font of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves’ pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet.

But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand; beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh plateloads of consumer goods; and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again in a happy renewal of clamour and intake.

“Stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow. They might have been competing with stopwatches”! It’s only fair to mention that when Leigh Fermor returned to his youth hostel the next morning (with a katzenjammer from hell), he discovered that the roommate he’d met the night before had stolen his rucksack along with his passport, his money, and his notebook. So perhaps his memories of Munich were colored by that.