Bamberg, Germany

The historic UNESCO town of Bamberg hosts more breweries than any other city in Germany (9 directly in town brewing over 50 different types of beer). Seeing as we were on our way to Oktoberfest in Munich, we decided we should make a pit stop in Bamberg as a warm up. There are two rivers running through Bamberg making for many picturesque bridges. The most famous is called Altes Rathaus, and has a little house in the middle of the river.

Bamberg was 100% awesome and we could have spent a lot more time exploring all of the small streets, markets and paths along the river. We started our self-guided beer tour at a bratwurst stand in square full of people enjoying the sunshine. After a nice .5L stein and a double foot long brat, we headed off on a mission to visit all of the breweries.

The German brew houses are a bit intimidating at first since they are always jam packed with open seating at long picnic style tables. Squeezing us into a few seats with some of Kevin’s high school German phrases (enshulegung bitte, ist hier noch frei?) was easy compared to navigating through the big German bar maids plowing through the crowds with fistfuls of steins! One thing that was a little unusual for us was the enormous amount of foam that is served on the beers. Sometimes, it looked as though we might only have been served a half liter in a liter stein! Luckily all of the euro glasses and steins are marked out with strict volume measurements and if full the stein would probably hold about 1.5L

With steins that big, it was impossible to sample all the varieties of “smoke” ales, Heffeweizens, and Bocks and be able to walk away with a favorite. What we do know is that the schnitzel is fantastic! Next time we’ll have to prepare some kind of tasting card and a few weeks to get through them all!

Sad to leave Bamberg behind, but excited to get to Munich, we boarded an early morning train surrounded by lederhosen and ‘weg beers’ and people of all ages flocking to Oktoberfest.