A toast to 500 years of beer

As Germany marks the anniversary of its celebrated ‘Reinheitsgebot’ brewing purity law, Will Hawkes sets out on a tasting pilgrimage in Upper Franconia

I’m looking for a brewery but I’ve found a charcuterie. It’s a headscratcher. I’m in Uetzing, a village in Upper Franconia, in search of a brewpub, and it looks like I’ve found it: there are lots of people drinking beer from tubby glass mugs. But at the bottom of a short flight of stairs, where I expect to see a bar, there’s a small shop; and instead of beer taps, there’s a counter full of smoked meats, cold sausages and salamis.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised: the brewery’s name is Uetzinger Metzgerbräu (Uetzing butcherbrewery), although I imagined the focus would be a bit more on the bräu bit. I’m on my way out when I hear a female voice behind me. “Don’t you want a beer?” she asks. Of course. I’m handed a glass of the lagerbier, a foam-topped red-amber delight that bursts with lemon-drop hop character. It’s remarkably good.

But then great beer is not unusual around here. There are more than 200 breweries in Upper Franconia, the most northerly part of Bavaria. From historic cities like Bamberg – which boasts 10 breweries for a population of just 70,000 – to the Fränkische Schweiz (Franconian Switzerland), where you can hike from brewery to brewery through hilly, heavily forested countryside, beer is everywhere.

In the year that Germany celebrates the 500th anniversary of the Reinheitsgebot, a law that dictates which ingredients native brewers can use, I’m here to get a taste of the world’s richest beer culture – oh, and have a bit of a walk too.

A short train ride from Nuremberg, Franconia’s biggest city, is my first stop: Weissenohe, at the heart of Franconian Switzerland. I’m going to walk the Fünf-Seidla-Steig (fivebeer trail), an 18km (11-mile) hike taking in five breweries.

Weissenohe’s Klosterbrauerei is yards from the station, in the shadow of the onion-domed church. As elsewhere in Franconia, religion and beer are closely linked: monks once brewed here (hence the name, Cloisters Brewery) and the woodpanelled, hop-festooned interior is suitably ecclesiastical. On my visit, the spicy, candy-sugar Bonator doppelbock, 8.2 per cent in strength, is available – but I’ve a long walk ahead so I restrict myself to a few sips.

I head along the river Kalkach in the direction of Gräfenberg, a medieval town built on the side of a steep hill. There’s a carp farm and, to my amusement, a restaurant/gift-shop in Gräfenberg’s converted station called Dr Gräfenberg’s G-Punkt, named after the man who “discovered” the female G-spot. Franconia might be religious (Gräfenberg is a Protestant town, but the region is varied) but it’s not prudish. The town has three extant medieval city gates, incredible views across Franconian Switzerland and two breweries – or so I thought.

I’m taken aback when through a window I spot what looks like rather old brewing equipment. Inside, a friendly woman confirms it was once the town’s communal brewhouse (a tradition that still exists in Oberpfalz, to the east of Franconia), but it hasn’t been used for years. It’s now a quirky office, with much of the kit still intact.

Congratulating myself on this discovery, I drop in for lunch at one of Gräfenberg’s breweries, Lindenbräu. A plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut goes beautifully with a vollbier (“full beer”; the name refers to its tax bracket, which is based on strength). It’s a toasty, toffee-bitter amber lager, still the preferred drop around here even if pale beers are growing in popularity.

After lunch, the route takes me to the top of the hill – where an austere war memorial glowers down across the valley – and over the back, through forests teeming with animal life, towards Brauerei Hofmann in the hamlet of Hohenschwärz. I find brewmaster Martin Hofmann fuelling his wood-fired boiler. He makes 15,000 hectolitres, or about 27,000 pints, a year, he tells me; not much by the standard of most industrial breweries, but he’s happy with his lot, and his beer is delicious. Outside, there’s a sign declaring his beer is “brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot”. Many think the purity law is what sets German brewing apart, but I think it’s the quality of the brewers, which is based on a culture of training and technical expertise rather than a 500-year-old law.

My final stop is at Elch-Bräu in Thuisbrunn, where a massive elk’s head, shot in Canada in 1986, looms over the main dining room, and where a delicious, austerely bitter Pils awaits. I need some rest: the next day I’m up early, heading for Bamberg.

It’s a 45-minute ride from Nuremberg, longer if you take the slow train, which stops everywhere in-between. I jump off at Buttenheim for a bite to eat. This market town of 3,500 souls has two sizeable breweries – Löwenbräu and St Georgen Bräu. I find a spot in Löwenbräu’s gasthof next to a middle-aged man, his jocular father and three sons wearing the kit of Nuremberg FC.

It’s a classic Franconian dining room. The furniture is heavy, dark and wooden, there are antlers on the walls and the window sills are chocka-block with chintzy trinkets. I order a lagerbier (served in a stoneware mug with metal lid) and schweinebraten, roast pork swimming in gravy with bread dumplings on the side. It’s filling and cheap (€7.50/£5.90), but that’s normal in Franconia. Afterwards I wander to the Levi Strauss Museum, where the inventor of jeans was born. Levi – then Loeb – lived on the ground floor of a now-smart 17th-century building with his family before emigrating to the United States to make his fortune in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. It’s a lively, interesting museum that does full justice to the town’s most famous son.

It’s a short trip to Bamberg, a Unesco world heritage-listed city of churches (the cathedral, which boasts the Bamberg Horseman, a magnificent 13th-century statue, is not to be missed), bicycles and, most importantly, breweries. My Bamberg hotel is also a brewery and a pub: Fässla, a lively remnant of the city’s past as a staging post on the road south from Berlin.

Not all of Bamberg’s 10 breweries offer overnight stays, but most of them are a warren of rooms, from arched dining halls to courtyards. The most interesting place to drink is the

The clinking of glasses – and stoneware mugs - is a common occurrence in Upper Franconia