Schneider Brauhaus

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. 

Always had an itch to write

Pub just off Old Street, where I occasionally drank
when I worked around the corner in the 1990s for a magazine
that you would get free in WH Smith if you bought a CD or video

Always had an itch to write (I really wanted to say ever since I was a youngster but it grated on me as all cliches should), a scratch that never stopped, a catch of the breath, the handle that paid out words whenever the correct numbers came up, the boots on the ground, the sound of words clanking and clinking and gleaming and teeming like industrious termites. I always had this urge to write. I was perhaps nine or ten or it might have been younger or older when I would read a book and thought, ‘I’d like to do that’ (not ‘I can do better than that’), perhaps in the manner of the young would-be brewer or cheesemaker who saw a process that they wanted to get involved in. 

Made-up football teams, fake folklore and then long letters to friends from college with made-up characters carrying on with outrageous schemes; lyrics (and the musical stuff), diaries, the feast of fecklessness that constitutes trying to write fiction, and at last being paid to put words together about this band or that band or whatever was happening and whoever was paying. I was writing. 

I don’t know how many words I have written over 30 years, I don’t want to know how many words. But they are still there, these words, swerving all over the place, heaving out somewhere into deep space — is it beer this week or travel or a pub trail that you can do from a train, or perhaps whoever wants some words and is willing to pay for them?

I read late into the night, dreaming of going south in the winter, but knowing I never will, unless it’s an event in Borough; I thread thoughts together and then lose them, invariably, immediately, lacking the consolation of caring about them. Then sometimes the words stick around like good, caring, gentle friends, and you are bolstered and castellated and secure against whatever ails you. That is being a writer, you can spend the currency of words like a Howard Hughes who cares about nothing, for there are always more words, but after so long do they mean anything? 

Beer deserves words; deserves sense and sensibility, clarity and also chaos; deserves the quiet moment, but also the noise of disagreement, a disbursement of amusement, the shake-down and takedown of Goliath, the slow, soothing moment of quietness, the momentum of noisiness, the frequent prod and jab against the mighty (and the night), the right way, the wrong way, the railway and the highway, the gateway, the weight of words, the sleight of hand, the three-card trick, the three chord wonder, the longing and the pondering, the sling-your-hook, the hoot of laughter, the slaughter of the innocents. Beer deserves words, as mighty as an overture, as tenacious as the teeth of a terrier, as heartfelt as a squeeze of an elbow, as clear as the universe, as sheer as a rock face before which you tremble and then aim to climb. Beer needs words. Deserves words. It’s all about beer. 

Darkness visible

Na Parkánu

I spend a lot of time in pubs and bars. I find them conducive to thinking; I find them an encouragement to mulling over things in my mind; I find beer acts as a Tesla-like conductor of ideas; I find that beer factors itself, all on its own, as a tester of theories, a lesser known philosopher whose name is absent from the history books. It’s also a place where I talk with friends, acquaintances and strangers (and also tune in and out of conversations with the obsessive sense of the radio ham), a loosening-of-the-larynx kind of place. 

Given that I spend a lot of time in pubs and pubs, I noted something that has occasionally badgered away at me, when I was silent and contemplative in Na Parkánu in Plzeň. This is a pub that I first visited in 2005, a Pilsner Urquell pub where the beer is as fresh as the ideas that emerge from the kind of think-tank where all barriers have been lifted with the ease of a well-oiled sprocket. I looked around. The waiters prowled, not as leonine as those in U Fleků or as CCTV-aware as the ’kobes in Cologne or Dusseldorf, but still possessed of a 360˚ vision, superhuman in the way they could spot a drinker with a parched throat in need of respite. Elsewhere groups of drinkers sat at the brown tables, on brown chairs, beneath brown panels and I started to wonder, to ponder, to mull. 

What is the attraction of dark wood in a pub, especially as it is so international, or at least European (and I include British within this term) in scope? Why do so many people (me included) find it comforting to sit in a space that is brown, oppressive to some, but cosy to others? 

The first thought that attempted to answer this question was that these wooden wombs are perhaps reminiscent of the dark forests from whence we came, where we all felt the same and during a time before electric light, a time when perhaps, disregarding tales of monsters and demons, we were more comfortable with the dark. An ancestral memory perhaps? Another thought tip-toed along, light and airy, just about deigning to add a certain something to the conversation. Was it the onetime dominance of wood in building materials and we’ve just become used (rather than programmed, which sounds a bit odd) to this dark interior, as it is something that speaks to our soul, makes us feel safe even.

Later in the day I visited Pivovar Chodovar, in the west of Bohemia, a family-owned brewery standing on terrain that is home to a big belt of granite (obviously that effects the water, but I’m not talking about brewing today). The entrance is through a tunnel that was laboriously cut through granite in the 19th century, or maybe earlier. The restaurant/bar is within this complex of dark stone and sombre wood and on the sunny day I visit it somehow acts as a cool bunker away from the hot sun, in the same way it provides warmth and comfort on a cold winter’s day. 

The restaurant in the rock as Chodovar

I guess what I trying to discover is why we crave and find comfort in this dark spaces even on a day when the sun is high and the air beneficent with warm zephyrs from the south? Heredity, ancestral, protective, comfortable, hidden or maybe I should just continue to enjoy this appetising, fulsome, lithe and lissom yet muscular pint of Pilsner Urquell I had in front of me, its gleam of orange and yellow a direct contrast to the dark fittings that surrounded me. How yin and yang, just like our moods when it comes to the pub.