Forty feet below the streets of Bamberg, Germany, things are bright, clean, and full of beer. And I do mean full: I'm packed into one of the lagering cellars at the Schlenkerla brewery with about 20 other people, and it's a tight fit, even for the skinny women – and you'd have to tie four of them together to equal about one of me. (That's us packed into the cellar right there ... I'm waaayyyy in the back, holding up a beer.)

 

These cellars were cut into one of the seven sandstone hills of Bamberg years ago, originally to provide sandstone (for building) and sand (for cleaning). Brewers quickly realized that the cellars provided free cold storage. The big lagering tanks were lowered down shafts on ropes, and now they're here to stay.

 

I've been spending a lot of time underground lately. I started my recent trip to Germany touring the breweries of Munich, including a visit to Paulaner, the folks who make the big Salvator doublebock I talked about last week. Paulaner has what they call a gravity brewhouse: kettles on the top and, as the beer moves along through the brewing process, it just keeps dropping. It's cheaper than pumping beer up or sideways, and an old brewing trick from the days before modern power. Except Paulaner's brew kettles are on ground level, and the beer ends up sleeping in tanks four stories below the street. It's quiet down there and clean as a whistle. Beer sleeps, slowly maturing.

 

Urban brewers like doing things underground. It leaves you free to do other things above ground, and it's a lot cheaper than sprawling into adjacent territory. Augustiner, the last independent Munich brewery, put its maltings underground. The brewery malts its own barley down there in what's called a "floor maltings," where raw barley is turned into malted barley in shallow beds in long, low-ceilinged halls, turned by an old set of flailing mechanical arms. (Raw barley must be malted so that you can extract fermentable sugars from it. These sugars are then consumed by yeast, which turns it into alcohol and CO2 during the fermentation process.)

 

We also visited the oldest monastic brewery in the world, Weltenburger Klosterbrauerei, where they've been brewing since 1050 AD – pretty amazing. It's tucked into a big bend of the Danube River, and it's a real monastery, too, with real priests; Father Leopold prayed for us at lunch. After a tour of the brewery, we wound up underground in their cellars. These were dug back into the high rock hills that line the river, without any fancy finishing – rough rock walls, dripping with moisture. But they were also full of squat white tanks containing slowly maturing beer, including one filled with their Asam Bock, a 6.9% doublebock. They opened up the valve on that one, and tapped off mugs for all of us: chocolatey, rich, and cold as balls (it was about 39 degrees in there), like a Wonka Bar in a glass. That's brewer Fritz Schweiger in the photo on the left, pouring beer for us right from the tank.

 

The catacombs under the Maisel brewery in Bayreuth are very extensive – and a bit hokey: they have rigged up several silly exhibits down there for tours, although there are serious exhibits from World War II as well. Cut into sandstone like in Bamberg, the brewery threw them open to the town in mid-April of 1945 when RAF Bomber Command came to visit. Thousands of people lived in the brewery tunnels for several days until the bombs stopped dropping and the fires died down. Some of the tunnels in this part of the world also housed munitions factories and other industries. It's one of the reasons the German war machine was still able to turn out equipment while its cities were being bombed into oblivion. (This photo here shows a map of the catacombs – "Katakomben" in German. It shows just how extensive they are.)

 

The Germans aren't the only ones with deep beer, of course. Just a couple weeks ago, I was under Sharp Mountain in Pottsville, PA, in the old lagering caves under the Yuengling brewery. America's oldest brewery recently re-opened its caves for tours, including a section with an old wood-lined access shaft and a tightly coiled spiral iron staircase, both severely eroded by the moisture common in these caves. Yuengling's all above ground now, with refrigerated tanks and cold storage for their kegs. But in the days of Prohibition, Treasury agents took care to brick up the caves, because without caves, Yuengling couldn't make beer.

 

The number of brewery caves is dwindling, but they live on in the cold, damp "fermentation halls" of many breweries. Some brewers with a sense of place, a sense of history, maintain their cellars as monuments to how things once were in the old days of brewing technology.

 

Winemakers, on the other hand, get vineyards. They are beautiful to behold on the hillsides of France, California, Germany, New York, Italy, Spain. Vintners tend the grapes as they grow and after the harvest as well.

 

Beer, through its raw materials like barley and hops and their dependence upon climate, is closely tied to the land, just like wine. Despite this connection, despite the living rock ribs of its deep cellars, beer is thought of as a manufactured product, when it's thought of at all. There's no deep respect, no mystical tie to the land, no vintages, no sappy and poetic stories about it in the food magazines. Beer is, as often as not, brewed in an industrial park. It's one of the reasons beer is not romanticized the way wine often is. I'm going to talk about this a bit more next week, when we get down on the ground and take a look at beer vs. wine in this country. You'll be surprised at what you find.

 

For now, keep your head down, and keep your beer cold. Go deep.

 

***

Little update here: I had to tell you about this year's Hunt. God bless the Internet; I checked Haag's Hotel (the picture on the opening page is classic) to be sure they were open between Christmas and New Year's, and found out that they were open for breakfast. We didn't even bother taking a vote, we just went. It was sick. Four of us sat down at a table for six. "It will give you more room to dig in," our waitress said.

 

Things started easy, with bowls of stewed apricots and apples, large-pearl tapioca, some big sugar cookies and coffee. Then the waitress returned, both arms laden with platters of scrambled eggs, big fat sausages, bacon, ham, cream chipped beef, pancakes, home fries, toast, apple butter, cottage cheese and scrapple. "You want more of anything, just let me know," she said.

 

The ham was from Dietrich's, where we get our meat fix, and it was divine stuff, smoky and subtle, short-grained and tender. I ate one slice with cream chipped beef on it, and that was good, too. It was all delicious, except the scrapple: they deep-fried it, where it should have been cut thicker and fried in a skillet. But ... a mere quibble. The only real regret we had was that we ran a bit late and had to leave without our slices of shoo-fly pie. "It's included in your breakfast," the waitress said plaintively as we left, gut-stoked and headed for the Yuengling tour. By the way, that whole sick feast was...eight bucks each. I love The Hunt.)