Coronavirus: Germany rediscovers the beer garden

The Bavarian tradition is enjoying a surge in popularity because it offers space and greater safety in the pandemic.

A waitress at a beer garden in Munich, southern Germany. Picture: AFP

The clink of heavy glasses filled with foamy beer, a pork knuckle wobbling on the plate, evening sunlight dappled through trees and an oompah band at a comfortable distance — the beer garden, like dirndls and lederhosen, is a Bavarian gift to the world.

Yet the concept, invented in the early 19th century, is now enjoying a surge in popularity across Germany and elsewhere because it offers space and greater safety in the coronavirus pandemic.

“This Bavarian invention is conquering the whole of Germany,” said Ingrid Hartges, of the German Hotel and Restaurant Association. “It offers a wonderful holiday from everyday life to relax for a few hours in the evening.”

Authorities have changed rules to allow footpaths and car parks to be transformed into temporary beer gardens so bars and restaurants can offset a reduction in the number of tables indoors under social distancing rules.

Guests enjoy the Seehaus beer garden in the English Garden park in Munich. Picture: Getty Images

Restaurateurs in Cologne last month converted a 270m stretch of cordoned-off road into a “corona-era beer garden” for 450 people to reduce congestion in the city’s nightspots. But it proved so popular that it was closed after just two weekends because it was taking too much business away from neighbouring bars.

A yearning for the outdoors after lockdown, cancelled foreign holidays and the warm summer weather have led to a beer garden renaissance.

“They are booming but indoor business isn’t at all,” said Lothar Ebbertz, director of the Bavarian Brewing Federation. Beer sales in the state, which accounts for about 600 of the nation’s 1400 brewers, fell 6.6 per cent in the first half of the year, in line with the rest of the country, as the lockdown shut restaurants and public events.

Thomas Geppert, director of the Bavarian Hotel and Restaurant Association, said: “Expanding the outdoor bar areas has been enormously important.”

The tradition dates back to the early 1800s when Munich brewers, who had to keep their lager cool in deep cellars over the summer because of the bottom-fermenting yeast they used, discovered outdoor serving as a business opportunity. They planted chestnut trees and put up tables and benches to serve beer direct from their cellars.

A yearning for the outdoors after lockdown, cancelled foreign holidays and the warm summer weather have led to a beer garden renaissance. Picture: Getty Images

When restaurants complained that this was hurting their business, Bavaria’s King Maximilian I decreed in 1812 that the brewers could serve beer but must not offer food or other drinks.

The guests responded by bringing their own food. While those traditional beer gardens that only serve beer have all but disappeared, the concept is now deeply ingrained in Bavarian culture. In a 1995 “beer garden revolution” 25,000 people marched through Munich to protest against a court ruling forcing one beer garden to close at 9.30pm. They won and it stayed open until 11pm.

Beer gardens became democratic places, open to everyone and freed from the social segregation in restaurants where labourers, landowners and the aristocracy had their own sections.

Prince Ludwig, who became the last Bavarian king, Ludwig III, and his wife Maria Theresa got a sense of that new-found equality when they demanded a table in a crowded beer garden and were told: “Their highnesses should sit on the grass like everyone else.”

The Times