Munich Oktoberfest at Stammtisch in Seaside by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I went to a beer tasting at
my neighborhood Bavarian Restaurant in Seaside, California called Stammtisch in
October 2000 to try my first beers from Munich, Germany.
My husband Laurent let me go
alone to the private room, reserved-ticket affair to eat a Bavarian meal and do
the tastings. I am sure he was in
another nearby restaurant with his buddies from work eating a similar meal and
doing a beer tasting, too.
Seating place tags took the
worry out of where I was going to sit. I
was seated at the end of a long table.
Soon an older man sat by me
and told me he was studying culinary history now that he was retired.
Ruth Reichl had just
published her food memoir, which I loved.
I wanted to record what I had learned about foreign cuisines for
neighborhood history and for my family.
I liked eating out when I went on trips overseas and thought going to
ethnic restaurants would be a good way to teach my daughter Florence, a
graduate of Juilliard, about other cultures.
My dinner mate said his
newest discovery was that boneless cuts of meat started to be sold in the U.S.
during World War II.
Meat was deboned to make for
lighter shipping according to my dinner mate and the trend caught on. I love trivia like this and looked forward to
picking this man’s brain all evening.
A couple joined us who did
home beer brewing. All three of them
corrected me in German, which I had never studied.
The man on my right brought
in his ten-month-old son to show him off to his buddies. He told his son, “We’re all going camping
soon!” as his wife scooped the baby up and went out of the dining room.
All of us discovered that we
had all lived in Wisconsin at some point in our lives. We made a Green Packers cheer and pounded our
fists together in the crowded room.
Savory aromas wafted in from
the kitchen making me very hungry, but the food took awhile to appear. We had bread on the table, but I thought the
goose fat set out to spread on the bread might be too rich and I did not want
to be the goose girl.
I tried a hefe-weizen beer to
start before the tasting actually started.
This is a wheat beer. My dinner
mates told me that “hefe” means “yeast” and that “weizen” means “wheat.” The beer reminded me of piecrust with a
little sugar added to it.
Ham hocks came out of the
kitchen with a knife and fork sticking out of them. Ham hocks are large. I asked for a slice of pork roast with onion
gravy, flour dumplings, and warm, shredded cabbage as my meal.
I thought of a sweet cookbook
I read when I lived in Virginia as I ate called The Flour is Different: German
Heritage Recipes and Traditions by Trudy Gilganast.
The author of this German
cookbook related that she had to recreate the baking recipes of her homeland
due to different wheat milling practices in our two countries.
The author of the book wrote
that Germans like sweet and savory combinations. I could tell from the book that Germans are
awesome bakers.
I remembered as I ate a
dumpling on my plate at Stammtisch that she said southern Germans make their
dumplings from flour and those in the northern German are made from potatoes.
A German beer importer was
our tasting master for the evening. The
first beer we tasted was Spaten Premium.
The importer told us that Spaten was the first beer to be tapped at the
first Oktoberfest in 1397.
He continued by saying that
Spaten still holds this honor at Oktoberfest.
Once it has been tapped, it receives a 21-gun salute.
“Then, we all drink like
fish!” he said.
I duly noted that Spaten
Premium is the number-one selling beer in Germany. It is considered a light beer with an alcohol
percentage above 4%, so it is considered a malt liquor in the U.S.
The importer went on to say
that Spaten Premium is a lager beer.
It is not aged and is ready
for consumption for four to five weeks.
“What does “lager” mean?” I
asked.
“To lay down,” one of my
dinner mates said. I took this
information in with a sip of the premium beer without really understanding what
that meant at the time.
A quick glance in Michael
Jackson’s Beer Companion informed me that brewers make lagers with cool
temperature-fermenting yeasts, which allows the beer to mature at freezing
point. That is a pretty technical
explanation for a clean-tasting wallop of beer.
Our next beer was a Spaten
Pilsen. The importer said Pilsen is a
town in the Czech Republic. When golden,
clear Pilsens were developed in 1842, other beers were cloudy.
The importer took this time
to point out that hops used in the beer-making give beer its flavor.
The importer said the Czechs
had hit upon the ability to control malting temperatures, which gave the beer
its golden color.
The Germans knew a good idea
when they saw one and copied the style.
This beer is supposed to be lighter in alcohol content than other beers,
but its bitter bite made me grimace.
My dinner mate said hops gave
the beer its bitter taste. I drank the
Dinkel-Aker Pilsen made in Stuttgart, Germany and liked it. I drank it when I lived there five years as
well.
At home, when I was reading Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion, I discovered that malt is grains of barley,
wheat, oats, or rye. We tried Spaten
Oktoberfest, which was in a blue bottle and tasted sweet.
Erdinger was our next beer,
which you have to pour in a tilted glass so the foam head does not spill over
the glass.
Then, we tried a
Kostrikisser. I often drank this beer in
Germany when we would go bowling with Philly Sandwiches on base in Stuttgart,
Germany.
Everyone laughed that I only
drank about 1/2 of the glasses that were served to me.
“That’s because I am about ½ your
body size,” I said.
“My husband is coming to pick
me up, and I don’t want to crawl out of here,” I remarked.
The importer laughed and gave
me some Oktoberfest glasses for my husband and me.
I smiled when I found out I
would be going to live in Stuttgart, Germany, which is close to the Land of the
Wittelsbach in Bavaria, Germany for five years. That was another exchange student type adventure for me.
I have always thought
Stammtisch, which means owner’s friends table in German, could make a lot of
money by holding Oktoberfest dinners.
This celebration in Germany is held over several weeks. Families celebrate Oktoberfest by buying
Oktoberfest beer at the store for the festival and making a festive meal at
home. (If you set up a reservation app
for the restaurant, you might be able to sell out Oktoberfest dinners in
advance.)
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