The ambience of Schneider Brauhaus is wood panelling, antlers, wrought iron fixtures and black-and-white prints from the past. A Bavarian version of the mood of many of our own taverns and inns, which usually bake a cake called Ye Old English Pub, and whose ingredients include tally ho, peasants working in the field and bowler hats as everyday wear. I have to ask the question for both Bavarian and English pubs: what past is it? Here, as I sit amidst the bustle of Schneider trying to catch the attention of a dirndl-and-DMs-attired waitress, all these images seem like an imagined past of nature and woodland, hunters and ancient ancestors — a kind of ancestral magic past? Deep down in our subconscious, submarined in our psyche, perhaps places like this Brauhaus add a kind of magic to our lives (providing we are the sort of person who wants to push the buzzer on the door marked ‘magic, please enter’), the kind of magic that our ancestors (you know the people we never heard about) over-dosed on until the coming of the Enlightenment, Darwin and Marx. On the other hand, perhaps you could say that there is still magic in our lives, as we continue to make music, write poetry, fall in love and salivate like a broken cistern as the thought of a great meal or magnificent beer. We are still in search of magic, which could be one reason why beer halls like Schneider’s are so popular (the beer isn’t bad either), and maybe a place like this, where I spent plenty of time over three days in Munich in June, gives us our fix of magic. Maybe all our great beers and meals have a similar magical focus, and we just have to give into this kind of magic.
A tram passes by with a sound like a half-hearted roar from a bored lion; the Danube seethes and swells with the rhythm of a massively erratic heart; a family sit on the steps below me, drinking pink champagne as if toasting the progress of this mighty river.
Would you like a beer, I ask myself. Yes, comes the reply, as if it from the malevolent dummy that toyed with Anthony Hopkins in Magic, though my inner voice has a little more benevolence. Gellért Hill rises across the river, a big cheese in Buda, and I reach it across the Liberty Bridge, which looks like it was made with a Meccano set.
I’d been told of a cellar, its name simple: Keg. I found it on Orlay Street, a brick-lined space with a long bar (and yes there were Edison lights) and a digital display of the beers on tap; 33 taps btw. What did I like? Well, I couldn’t resist Mad Scientist’s Liquid Cocaine, which was an energetic DIPA packed with hop synergy and a resiny dry finish (a little bit of Budapest that was forever Portland perhaps?).
I wondered what the Portman Group would make of the name.
I also enjoyed the softness and calmness of Fóti Pils (a brewery that Evan Rail wrote about in the last edition of 1001 Beers) and then I stepped out back into the heat and sun of a Budapest June and just around the corner noticed the Hotel Gellért Gyogyszallo, which with its balconies, turrets and towers looked like it had been carved out of the hillside.
Later on, like many a beer tourist I went to Élesztő, a potent ruin pub in an old yard, with a cracked glass roof, bare brick walls, wooden tables and chairs, a worn concrete floor, a tree growing in its middle and there was yet another glass of Liquid Cocaine. I like this beer.
