Monday Beer Blogging: Best Beer I've had where I didn't expect it.

Sometimes you run across a great beer when you aren't looking for. Business occasionally takes me to Switzerland. Now the Swiss are famous for many things, but beer is not one of them. Their one internationally famous beer, Samichlaus ended production shortly after the brewer, Hürlimann, was acquired by the international conglomerate Carlsberg. But there is hope. A few regional brewers such as Brauerei Schützengarten in St. Gallen still make decent beers. I am told that the French speaking cantons have many thriving microbreweries and there are even a growing number of microbreweries in the German speaking region. So the next time you are at the World Economic Forum in Davos watch out for beers from the Monsteiner brewery.



This is the Monsteiner Huus ("house") beer. It is unfiltered (i.e. it is a "live" beer with yeast and hence cloudy) and has a slightly sweet finish that is nicely balanced with the hop bitterness. I first had it at Restaurant Kulm in Wolfgang-Davos where not only is the beer on tap, they us it to make a very nice beer fondue.

Brauerei Monsteiner (which, by the way claims to be the highest brewery in Europe at 1625 meters above sea level) also brews an amber colored beer called Wätterguoge ("salamander") This is brewed with a small amount of malt that was dried over a beechwood fire giving it just a hint of smokiness as well as adding to the darker color.


Smoked beers ("rauchbier" in German) are an old tradition that has pretty much died out, except in Franconia (the region around Bamberg, Germany). I mentioned that I found a very good Swiss smoked beer to Robert Pawelczak a brewmaster who teaches brewing in Franconia, he said "of course it's good, the brewer was a student of mine." The world is small.

Monday Beer Blogging

Heaven in a glass:


One of the world's finest beers: the altbier from Brauerei zum Uerige in Düsseldorf. A reddish copper colored beer (the name "altbier" translates literally to "old beer" but in this case means more "beer in the old style") is just under 5% alcohol by volume, has a clean and malty taste with just a hint of hop flavor. It is fairly well attenuated (i.e. "dry") and a nice bitter finish that leaves you wanting another one as soon the glass is empty. Which is good because the waiter will plop another one down without asking (and mark your coaster to keep track). The glasses are on the smaller side for Germany .25 L but this insures the beer is always fresh and not too warm (if you drink from a 1 liter mug as the Bavarians do, the beer will be warm and flat by the time a typical person gets to the bottom).

This beer is also tradition in a glass: it is served from wooden barrels set on the counter, with no help from anything but Mr Newton and his laws of gravity. The brewery is a charming mix of old and new: all the pumps and valves are controlled by a state of the are computerized brewing system, but the brewer still checks the volume in the brew kettle with a big wooden dipstick. The wooden kegs have RFID chips embedded for inventory control but the bung is hammered in with a big wooden mallet.

The brewery itself is on a busy corner in the Düsseldorf Altstadt ("Old Town"). It has slowly taken over a good portion of the block, expanding into neighboring buildings as they become available. The result is room has its own personality and its own clientele.


(Düsseldorf is about an hour and a half by fast train from Frankfurt airport)