Looking for help in Frankfurt

I live in FFM and suggest Naïv... the only craft beer bar/restaurant in this town.
There is one micro-brewery near the center of town, Braustil, that makes fresh, unfiltered top notch beers. A quick search in the little box on the top right of this page will get you quickly to numerous reports I've made on these places, especially in the German craft beer thread.

Also, good German food: you won't it at either of those places above, but seriously, you never heard of the Apfelwein places in Sachsenhausen? I wrote about Äppler extensively in this thread. These places do wonderful traditional German food.

 

I figured @boddhitree would chime in, I haven't been in FFM for a while now, but always enjoyed the "Schäufelchen" over the pig's knuckle (Hax'n), my favorite being served at Wagner in Sachsenhausen.

This area is quite touristy, but who cares, still lots of locals and it has a lot of tradition. Don't order beer, enjoy the Apfelwein.

EDIT - Haha - just now seeing your comments.

 

I'm standing around Braustil right now. The google entry is the old. Georg says, look at their homepage, and he said they close at 9, 10 pm or whenever the last group leaves. You really must go here. The Oak Wheat is good, as is the Pale Ale. And I just got to try a new beer that's still fermenting that us super complex with smoke flavor. Sascha, der Braumeister, said it didn't have that in it, but maybe roast malt, he won't reveal the ingedients yet…hmaybe this weekend, he said, but it was delicious. Not oin sale yet, next week, I bet.
At Naïv, get the Kellerbier, BraukunstKeller Amarasi or the Backbone Splitter IPA. Cheers.

 

Woo-Hoo!

Two Texans at Braustil!

Yippee Ki-yay!?!

Cheers!

 

Cant speak for Jack, but that didn't look like an insult to me.

 

Douglas,

My understanding is that yippee ki-yay means: “a cowboy expression of extraordinary happiness or joy.”

Do I need to go to the Urban Dictionary to see if there is another definition for this expression!?!

Cheers!

Jack

 

Thought so too. Maybe we're both wrong.

 

I took it to mean Jack was wowed by the idea of 2 people from the same state partaking of good bier in a far-away city otherwise known as a bier-wasteland...

Prosit!

 

Wow than German sense of humor has really rubbed off on you.

 

Can we just drop this? Ugh... I found it funny but silly; I'm used to it, having often been asked where my cowboy hat is and why I don't have a Texan accent. Educating folks is easier than getting angry at them.

Anyway... @gfg0020, did you find any decent beer in FfM? And are you still in town this weekend? Ein Prost an allem.

 

NP, hope you had a good time. Went to high school in Frankfurt, miss it

 

There are a few things I'm not fond of in Germans (militant liltle ol ladies and mommies, constantly complaining, blind adherence to rules, inflexibility, etc), but a lack of humor isn't one of them. It's stupid meme that really needs to be put to bed. Germans tend to be quite serious and often take literally what we say b/c they often say what they mean. So, they aren't very ironic, a primary source of British humor, and they aren't sarcastic, a overwhelming source of American humor, and we say they don't have humor becaus they don't try to make themselves look to witty (irony) or make themselves look superiour by laughing at others' exepense (sarcasm). Thus, no irony & no sarcasm = no humour? Germans have tons of humor, and it's by actually being funny. Ok.... Back to beer.

 

Was at Braustil yesterday afternoon and talked with Sascha, der Braumeister. He asked me if the Frankfut Pale Ale (FPA) was an IPA IMO. I had to chuckle. I said "It's getting closer." This is only his second attempt at making this style in his life. He really had in his previous brewer jobs made only your basic German styles, and only now is he learning how to stretch his stylistic (beer-wise) wings. The first attempt a few months ago at dry hopping was, kindly put, weak. This is his second attempt, and he's getting closer this time to an IPA. He's also trying to figure out how to dry hop on German equipment that wasn't designed for it. He knows it's not an IPA; hence the FPA nomenclature. In fact, while he was first thinking about making the FPA, he picked my brain on how dry hopping actually works. He's learning how much hops he needs and which ones work best. Don't forget, this is all going way out on a limb for him. Personally, I thought the FPA had a lot more C-hop aroma than the 1st batch did. He admitted to using Bravo hops for dry hopping, and he's basically teaching himself as we speak. I'm sure in the future, it'll come closer and closer to an IPA, but I still love his present grain bill for the FPA, using Pilsner and Müchner malts. Anyway, this present batch of FPA has been selling well and he's gotten great responses from a majority of his German customers, 90% of who have never tasted anything but Pils and Weizen. For example, yesterday,

I saw a typical customer reaction, what I. call the "reactionary German" beer drinker. After a lengthy explanation of how the FPA tasted, he got the typical, for Germans at least, response of blank face and incomprehensibity of their mind processing ideas in their schema of beer which did not compute. You could see the semi-look of horror, actually more terror, creep over their face as they imagined "fruity flavors & beer?" You could see them imaging the Schöfferhofer Grapefruit Beer-juice concoction in their minds. Then Sascha gave them each a sample. After 2 seconds, both blurt out "that's no BIER!" In other words, it wasn't a Pils, which for every non Bayern German is the definition of beer, so automatically, it's not beer. "No, they said, we want a beer." So then they received a Helles and noticeably relaxed, knowing their world order was put right again.

Don't y'all forget, what we semi-beer-hipster think of now as beer is not what 95% of Braustil's German clientele expect when they drink a "bier". Us foreign customers probably only make up 5% at most of his revenue. They've gotta make money with the customers they have. Unfortunately, they're not, as I would, marketing themselves as hip or cool or to 20-something hipsters, as Naïv is doing. Rather, they're going after the staid banker-type, the tons of 30 to 5o crowd that live in that neighborhood and are more in the Foodie/wine groove, and bringing that crowd around is going to be a matter of education on their part. In a way, Sascha's learning curve on non-German styles has been much steeper than his clientele. That also explains why he said he'll always have the Helles on tap. I don't blame him, really.

I'm confident that eventually he'll brew an IPA that'll knock our socks off. Unfortunately, he can only experiment in 500L batches.

 

One more thing… Apfelwein is basically what Brits and Märicans call "hard cider." You can make your own Hessen-style Apfelwein at home easily. I've talked to a few who's family have been making it for generations.

1. It's a quite simple.... press apples, or buy cloudy apple cider,
2. then leave open to air for a few weeks.
3. Presto, wild yeast makes Apfelwein.
4. Filter.