Munich - Beer lovers have flocked to Oktoberfest for more than 200 years, but that's nothing: another landmark of Munich beer culture is more than twice as old.
Founded in 1589, locals and tourists alike bask in the pleasures of traditional Bavarian dishes, oompah music and, of course, cold brews at the city's Hofbraeuhaus.
Every week for the last 62 years Andre Bandel has drank at a landmark Munich beer hall, the Hofbraeuhaus. “I always sit at the same table,” the 82-year-old says.
In his traditional Bavarian costume and his white beard, you can immediately spot him in the main hall of the cavernous building.
“You get to meet the entire world in the Hofbraeuhaus,” he says, explaining his love for the place, now marking its 425th birthday. Seated at a long wooden table, Bandel is about to dig into a liver dumpling soup - and of course 1 litre of beer in his own stein.
Bandel is one of 616 regular guests who drink their beer from steins reserved for their lips only. Directly to the left of the entry there is a padlocked cupboard with shelves containing the 1-litre mugs.
There are some genuine treasures to be found there, with some of the steins more than 100 years old.
“For many, having a space for one's own stein is better than winning the lottery,” says Hofbraeuhaus spokesman Stefan Hempl. Considering that the beer hall has 3,500 regulars, the waiting list for a shelf spot is a long one.
The lease for the spot in itself is cheap - just 4 euros (about R50) per year, paid in cash to the beer hall.
Many of the regulars don't pay cash for their beer, but rather with specially produced tokens. The guest who buys 10 tokens gets a another one as a bonus. It was in such a manner that the patrons paid for their ales in the brewery's earliest years.
Bavarian Duke Wilhelm V founded the brewery in 1589 in a bid to save state money. Up till then, the royal court had imported its beer from a distant part of Germany, the Lower Saxony town of Einbeck.
“That was incredibly expensive, and so having his own brewhouse was a measure to ward off state bankruptcy,” Hempl said.
Very quickly the duke's beer was coveted far beyond Bavaria's borders. When, during the Thirty Years War (1618-48), the Swedes besieged Munich, they let themselves be bought off not with money, but with 362 pails of strong bock beer.
About 200 years later, the beer became useful again, when the Munich opera house caught fire.
“In the winter of 1823 the water needed to fight the blaze was frozen,” Hempl said. So beer was brought in large buckets from the Hofbraeuhaus to preserve the opera house from destruction.
In 1852, the brewery ceased being the monarch's household property and became an asset controlled by the Bavarian state government. The 1.9 million litres of beer tapped each year in the Hofbraeuhaus are still helping to fill the Bavarian state coffers.
One recent evening, sitting at one of the more than century-old wooden tables in the Schwemme, the core area of the beer hall, was a group of powerfully built American tourists.
“We came here straight from the airport,” one of them says as the group happily banged their glass mugs together in a toast, taking pictures on their smartphones. “We could hardly wait to get here.”
In fact, American fans of Bavaria's beer culture can also visit a Hofbraeuhaus in Las Vegas. It is one of seven licensed replicas of the Munich original found on three continents.
“The facade of the new building in Las Vegas looks exactly like the one here,” Hemple says. Every beer served there comes from the Munich brewery.
Hempl denies suggestions that the Munich Hofbraeuhaus is only preserved to amuse foreign tourists. “This is authentic Bavarian culture,” he says.
Now that the programme is focused on lively brass band music, it is bringing more and more young Munich natives back to the pleasures of the beer hall. Hempl says the mix of locals and tourists is about evenly balanced.
All the same, the stream of tourists from every corner of the globe remains unbroken.
“Now and then, a guest may walk off with one of our mugs as a souvenir,” Hempl says. But it is also a case that many a mug thief, smitten by a bad conscience, will send the mug back - sometimes many decades later. - Sapa-dpa