Following is a story about a very special beer garden in Vienna. First, kindly allow an unconventional kickoff. My wife Diana took most of the photos reprinted here, and somehow escaped being shown in any of them. That won’t do. This view is from the 1516 brewpub near the Ringstrasse in central Vienna, a few days after our Schweizerhaus fete. We clean up nicely.
Now, your regularly scheduled column.
Hip Hops: A foamy Budvar session with the “Beer Pope” at Vienna’s fabled Schweizerhaus
I’ve heard it said that during the early days of photography, when camera shutters were slow and exposures lengthy, the gorgeous, billowy head of foam perched atop a properly dispensed glass of beer was prone to dissipate entirely before the image was even close to being ready.
And, that various photo-friendly “hacks” were readily adopted. Among the simplest of expedients was crowning that glass with a big tuft of non-shrinkable cotton.
Voila! Witness the pioneering creation of perma-head.
A century later, salt would be added to the non-alcoholic brews between takes during the filming of Cheers, helpfully explaining why the sitcom’s barflies often seemed to be consuming Czech mlíkos ― which wouldn’t become trendy until the post-literate Instagram era we currently must endure, although it bears repeating that when I first traveled through the Czech lands when Reagan was King, the notion of a typical communist-era workingman ordering a glass of pure foam, without liquid touching the half-liter pour line, would have been laughable in the extreme.
Unless it comprised a theatrical set piece in an absurdist production written by Vaclav Havel himself, the playwright and future president: Look, now the commies are making us “drink” foam instead of beer.
Maybe you just had to be there; ya can’t tell them kids nuthin’, nowadays.
Meanwhile, cotton balls and social media gimmicks aside, it is a perennial fact of beer drinking life that a firm, aromatic collar of foam on a glass of beer genuinely matters.
During my decades in the pub business, it was a daily objective to pour pints of beer that were crowned with an appropriately creamy portal for optimal sipping.
To be honest, our draft systems back then were simplistic, even elemental. They...Read more
