The untrammelled joy of being in Bamberg

With a large glass of heaven-sent Märzen Rauchbier

A red-faced, goatee-bearded man sat at the other end of a long table, upon which several Americans were also in occupation. He glanced at his glass of dark beer, which he had brought from a hatch in the wall opposite, and took a deep swig before sighing with the contentment of the just. He looked at his phone, chuckled, and took another impressive gulp and then chuckled again. Meanwhile, the Americans on his table, who I’d overheard saying they came from Milwaukee, continued to discuss the beer they had nearly finished. ‘What did you think of it?’ said one of them to another. ‘Smoky,’ came the reply, ‘not like the beer at home’. The chuckling man joined in on the conversation. ‘I love it,’ he said, adding he was from Denver. His fellow Americans lifted their now empty glasses in salute and prepared to leave.

Here in Bamberg, Schlenkerla is a tavern on the tourist trail as well as a draw to serious scholars of smoked beers and, of course, also home for locals who have known the place since they were old enough to drink. I was there to study the beers as well as the mood of the pub, a shadowy interior that made me imagine a forest of dark, aged wood, whose panels were dotted with antlers and old prints. Meanwhile a steady stream of people passed, many snapping away with their phones. Like the old centre of Bamberg there was a touch of Disneyland or maybe, in a darker moment, Valhalla about Schlenkerla. I loved it. I was aware of the teeth-on-edge scrape of wooden chairs on the hard stone floor in the lobby entrance, where I stood at a high top table, but comfort was offered by a large glass of heaven-sent Märzen Rauchbier. Smoked fish (herring or kipper), toffee, the fire of passion, slightly burn toffee, charred but not acrid, smoked ham balanced by a malt sweetness, rich and fulsome, full-bodied and pliant in the pleasure it created on the palate.

This was my second visit to Bamberg, the last one being in 2018 when I spent a couple of days there, a brief holiday in other people’s lives if you like, for that is the meaning of travel to me, alongside a sense of being lost, wandering without purpose and fulfilling the desire for something that plucked me out of my ordinary, day-to-day mundanity. On this return trip, there was something else that trilled through my thoughts when I emerged from the train station. It was a feeling of untrammelled joy and excitement, a mood of anticipation, a sense of pilgrimage even, for ever since I had first read about Bamberg, in Michael Jackson’s New World Guide to Beer in the late 1980s, I had become enthralled by the town and its beer culture.

Beer to me is an open book about travel, people, friendships, memories, family, history, architecture, bars and pubs, breweries and the harmonic nature of the liquid in your glass. It is about how a landscape can shape the beers that people drink and about how it can be something more than refreshment, and even provide a guide to life and living as thorough as literature, poetry, music or meditation. This was why returning to Bamberg once more unleashed a surge of joy within, a feeling that I also experience when I go to the lagerlands of Bohemia and Bavaria, or drink beer in a brown cafe in Flanders, walk into a rural pub in England or spend time searching for soul-shaking beer in somewhere like Bologna or Barcelona.

I left Schlenkerla in the middle of this autumnal Sunday afternoon and briefly sat on a stone seat in a square, watching families and friends go by. I then thought about how travelling is also a dislocation from home, as passersby took their dogs for a walk and children ran about with their parents and siblings, and I knew that they would all soon go back to where they felt most comfortable, their homes. So, containing on this journey of thought, I persuaded myself that another purpose of the pub was an evocation of a sense of home. Sometimes whilst travelling, and especially on a Sunday afternoon in a small town, while watching people going by, I often felt like a child pressing its nose against a glass window and seeing those inside, warm and secure in their sense of home. Philosophising finished for the day, I stood up and went to another pub, another home, this time the pub for Spezial, where its brewery and maltings lived at the back.

At Spezial I felt warm and comfortable and had beer. I was seated and it was not crowded. Notebook out and followed by a generous gulp of the Rauchbier (not as assertive in its smokiness as Schlenkerla) I returned to my personal theme about how travel dislocated us, especially when as a beer traveller you joined in with the locals’ places of familiarity, their home from home: the pub. As I sat there, the chuckling man came in, ordered a beer and sat opposite me. After he finished his beer he got up to leave and stopped by my table. ’We will see each other in the next brewery I suspect,’ he chuckled. I replied we wouldn’t as I would be returning to my Nuremberg hotel soon and I had a train to Brussels early next morning. He left with a chuckle and walked out into the Hansel and Gretel landscape of Bamberg and probably chuckled when he ordered his next beer.

Shameless plug: my latest book A Pub For All Seasons has had some great reviews in the press and is available from all good bookshops and online (Headline).