My friend called me up the other day and told me they had the new Shiner at our crummy lil' H.E.B. up here in cotton pickin' dadgum no Black Lager Huntsville. I wouldn't give a shit, but he said it was Munich-style Helles. Which made me jump up and run down there and get a six pack. On a work night. Living dangerously!
And so I flew into Zurich back in the summer of '02 to go to summer school in Austria. Upon arrival, I took a train to Munich where I spent the first weekend before going an hour or so south to Innsbruck for school. I don't sleep well sitting and the flight was an overnight so I spent the whole flight wide awake. Got some vittles at the Zurich train station and rode into Munich -- about a 3 hour trip. So I got to Munich, having never been to Europe, not really speaking German, jet lagged, sleepy, hungry, etc. I found my hotel, checked in, dropped off my shit, and went downtown looking for some food.
I was
hungry and
tired, y'all. Every place in the main plaza place was packed with well-scrubbed yuppie and tourist types fallin' out everywhere and all the freakin' menus were printed in this crazy olde englishe script that was
impossible to read. Having grown up with
some of the food, I probably could've figured out something to order, but I seriously couldn't read the damn menus. I was desperate. So I went inside one of the places and sat at a table with some old dudes. I had no idea what food to get, so I thought I would get a beer to give me more time to think about it. I had read that you order it by asking for ein mass (which means a measure) and you either ask for helles or dunkles (light or dark). So, since it was hot as hell, I asked the crusty old lady for ein mass of helles. She brought it out and it was one of these huge ass glasses. I gave her a 20 or 50 euro note and she asked haben sie klein geldt or some such which I figured out probably that she wanted smaller denominations (after looking stupid for what felt like about five minutes, it kinda clicked). No lady, I just got here from the damn ATM machine. This is the first coin I spent! I never even seen a Euro before! Visibly annoyed, she grunted and booked off to get change. I took a sip of the beer and it was, I swear to Christ, the
best beer I have ever had in my life! It was basically a liter of beer -- huge. You have to lift it with both hands.
Sometime shortly after that first sip or two, I realized that all the old bastards around me were unrepentant drunkards and definitely regulars -- the alcohol was seeping out of their burly, gnarly, sore-encrusted
forearms -- and I was, though amusing at first, basically unwelcome. They started grunting weird shit in German and it was like the walls were caving in on me and everything went topsy-turvy and everybody was glowering and poking and shit like I was a fresh piece of ass chunked into the county jail in the middle of the night. Fuck that! I was like, hell no, I gotta get out of here. Of course, I just wanted to sit and drink my massive beer in the cool darkness and maybe, no, definitely get something to eat. She brought me my change and I CHUGGED that motherfucker! I shuffled (quickly) outside to see all the yuppies sitting out in the market leisurely and nice in the sun and everything came down on me at once -- the beer, the jetlag, the hunger, the sun, the disorientation, all that mess. My knees went wobbly and I almost fell on my ass. I almost crawled to the train station and got one of those mozzarella, tomato, and basil sandwiches that are ubiquitous in European train stations and a few beers and stumbled back to my hotel room, took a bath, drank some more beer, and crashed the hell out.
Other places I went in German-speaking Europe had objectively better beer (Czech Republic is amazing), but I'll always have a soft spot for that Munich Helles. SO, when my pal said that was the new Shiner, I decided I better try it. It's pretty good. It's in the same ballpark as what I had in Southern Germany, but it's not as sharp or fresh or amazing. Still, it's the kind of beer I would just assume drink most of the time. Brits run down lager and I very much look forward to going there and trying their beer, but this sort of thing would be my everyday beer if I had my druthers. Mighty fine!
And to think, we've got it up here in Hunstville, a place that's never seen the Black Lager or whatever they're calling it.
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