Munich Oktoberfest at Stammtisch in Seaside by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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.)

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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