Long overdue
Long overdue is not just this post, published over a year after the trip it describes, but also what it’s about. For years I have wanted to visit the village in question, and I finally made it at the end of 2019. It is rare and precious to encounter a beer culture that has not yet been destroyed either by corporate monopolies or by “craft beer”. Only a few such oases survive in Europe. One of them is the Zoigl culture in Oberpfalz, in the north-eastern corner of Bavaria, between Franconia and Bohemia. This region is supposedly called the Upper Palatinate in English, but as I doubt many outside Germany have ever heard of the place, and I have no idea what a palatinate is anyway, I am just going to call it the Oberpfalz. The unique feature of Zoigl culture is a beer which is made in a shared, communal village brewery. When the wort has been made in the Kommunbrauhaus, the brewers take it home and ferment and mature it in their own basements and garages. The Oberpfalz alone once had 7
