Bavaria, not including the Rhenish Palatinate, uses over six million bushels of barley, and upwards of seven million pounds of hops, annually, in its breweries, making over eight million eimers, that is, about five million barrels of beer. But nearly half the kingdom is wine-growing, and uses comparatively little beer; so that this is mainly consumed in the other half, that is, by about three millions of people. At an average price of three and a half cents per quart, there is consumed in the kingdom fifty million florins, or over twenty million dollars, annually, in this beverage. Both manufacture and consumption have their head-quarters in Munich. The quantity manufactured in this city alone in 1856-7 was nine hundred and fifty thousand eimers, or about five hundred and seventy thousand barrels, being nearly five barrels a head for the whole population, men, women, and children. Allowing for the amount exported, or sent out of the city, there remains something like four barrels to each person. This is one quart, or four of our common table-glasses, per day. But some drink none, others little; a man is scarcely reckoned with real beer-drinkers until he drinks six masses,—twenty-four of our common tumblers; ten masses are not uncommon; twenty to thirty masses—eighty to one hundred and twenty of our dinner-glasses—are drunk by some, and on a wager even much more. The sick man whose physician prescribed for him a quart of herb-tea as the only thing that would save him, and who replied that he was gone, then, for he held but a pint, was no Bavarian; for the most modest Bavarian girl would not feel alarmed in regard to her capacity, if ordered to drink a gallon,—certainly not, if the liquid were beer.
The aggregate labor performed in this branch of popular industry is thus seen at a glance. But how is this done, and by whom? What is the noise or noiselessness with which such torrents of this foaming liquid rush daily through the channels of human bodies made originally too small to admit half the quantity? What are the final results upon body, mind, and heart of the present and future of the race? Does government encourage, stimulate, control, and turn to account this national appetite? These questions invite, and will well repay, a few moments' attention.
I once heard a college student announce as the text of his oration Lindley Murray's well-known definition of the verb,—a word which signifies "to be, to do, or to suffer"; and he followed up his announcement by a most beautiful and conclusive argument to show that this definition describes with equal accuracy three classes of men into which the whole world may be divided: a class who have no purpose in life but simply "to be"; an active class, whose mission is "to do," to which they bend all their energies; and a passive class, who merely "suffer" themselves to be employed as the tools of the men of action. Whether he would have modified his statement, had he known something of Bavarian beer-drinkers, I do not know; for, although these belong, doubtless, in general, to the class of men which he designated as having no purpose but simply "to be," yet they certainly have a decided preference as to the means of their being, which must be beer; they have activity enough to get where this can be obtained, and to handle the needed quantity; and the man who holds and bears about fifteen or twenty quarts a day must have no small share of the grace of passive endurance.
There is a class of the nobility too poor to treat themselves with the diversions of court-life, and with notions of noble birth which forbid them to engage in business, especially as they would thereby forfeit their rank. They fund their small means, so as to yield them a stated income; and in spending this and their time, they fall into a round which brings them three or four times a day to some place where beer is to be found, and with it a billiard-table and a reading-room. This class does not, perhaps, embrace a very large number of the nobility, but it is largely reinforced from others, whose small means are similarly invested, and whose whole time is on their hands for disposal. The class of men engaged in business, and pursuing it somewhat actively, give less attention to beer during the day. They take a couple of glasses—four of our common tumblers—at dinner, and perhaps send out a servant occasionally during the day to replenish a pitcher for the counter,—not, however, to treat customers, as used to be done in our country; but as beer had been all day secondary to business, the latter is dropped for the evening, and the undivided attention bestowed upon the national beverage. A large portion of the poor, and many who cannot be called poor, have not the means for this indulgence; and yet men and women are seldom seen at their work without a mug of beer standing near them. Ladies have the same provision in their families, as also students, and all who occupy rented rooms in connection with the families of the city; from ten to one o'clock servant-girls, with pitchers in their hands and immense bunches of keys hanging to their apron-strings, are seen running to and from the neighboring beer-houses thick as butterflies floating in a summer sun, and seem far more as if on business requiring haste. No room is sought for renting without an inquiry as to the quality of the beer of the neighborhood; and the landlady feels that her chances for a tenant are exceedingly slim, if she cannot furnish a satisfactory recommendation in this respect. Scarcely a house in the city is thirty steps from where the article can be had. The places fitted up with seats and tables for drinking accommodate from twenty to five hundred persons, and even one thousand or more in summer, when a garden is generally prepared with seats for the purpose. At these larger places, music is often provided, and ladies are frequently found lending the charm and solace of their presence, and sometimes a good deal more, to the other sex, in this self-denying work, in which the men have generally been the great burden-bearers. But the greatest crowds of real beer-drinkers go to another class of houses,—that is, the breweries themselves, where rooms are always fitted up for drinking. Of these the Court Brewery is perhaps in highest repute, and is at least a great curiosity. I visited it three or four times during a six years' residence in the city, and always in company with others who wished to see the lions of the place, and for the same reason that would have taken us to see a menagerie. Why did the monks never think of applying to such places the figure by which they protested against the introduction of coffee, "the fumes of hell"? The smoke of five hundred cigars or pipes rising to a ceiling which had been thus smoked for centuries,—the hoarse hum of five hundred voices uttering the German gutturals from tongues thickened by the use of beer, and floating heavily through an atmosphere of densest smoke, dimming the lights and turning all into an indefinite and uniform brown color,—this may indeed be a picture of Elysium to some minds, but to ours it is not. I never found a vacant seat there, nor felt a desire to occupy one, had there been such. Stone mugs of double the size of the common glasses are used, perhaps to save servants' labor in drawing, which is no small matter, as a barrel of beer lasts not more than ten minutes at the height of the drinking-time of the evening.
None of the drinking-places in the city are filled until evening. In the afternoon many take their walks into the suburbs, and turn aside where a glass may be had. On all holidays the whole city is adrift, much of it in the surrounding country, and most of this drift lodges against the suburban beer-houses. In summer evenings there are frequent entertainments, some provided by the government,—as one every Saturday evening from six to seven o'clock, from May to November, a mile from the city, in the English Garden, where sometimes two thousand persons may be in attendance, to hear the royal bands play. It is presumed that there will always be a considerable number among these who will not be able to stand it an hour without beer, and a beneficent provision is made for such,—seats and tables for at least five hundred persons being there provided, and often filled, so that some must drink standing.
The regularity with which the men of Munich bring themselves around to the same place at about the same time of day, especially if that place is a beer-house, is remarkable,—indeed, amusing. A gentleman residing in Berlin, where this everlasting beer-drinking does not prevail, mentioned to me, as one of the most ludicrous occurrences of his life, an invitation which he once received to visit a Munich professor whose acquaintance he had made in Berlin. The professor told him, that, in case he should arrive in Munich after a certain hour of the day, he must go directly to the Court Brewery, and would find him there. We do indeed regard this as the consummation of the ridiculous; but to this bachelor professor it was the most natural thing in the world. He might change his lodgings half a dozen times in a year, and so might not be readily found; but the Court Brewery would remain from generation to generation, and while he lived he expected regularly to appear there, and there, of course, was the only place where he could make appointments for years to come.
This incident will intimate what an external view of this dark brown mass of humanity would never have hinted,—that it contains men of learning and parts. Could one go round and listen to each party by itself, instead of hearing the low rumble which falls upon the ears of the general observer, the profoundest problems of philosophy, statesmanship, philology, geography, ethnography, and history would be found undergoing the most searching examination. Fame says of our politicians who rise to positions which ought to be occupied only by statesmen, that they frequent low places and mingle with the boisterous crowd. This is probably not a slander. But these men frequent such places only for a purpose. Their tastes do not lead them thither. They go no oftener than serves their purpose. Not so with the learned German beer-drinker. He is in his own proper society. Chinese or Sanscrit, Arabic or Coptic, the last discoveries in the interior of Africa or about the North Pole, or the more recondite regions of chemistry or mineralogy, may be the theme of a familiar discourse, which each of the party may fully appreciate.
To these places, of course, only the men resort. Indeed, in this part of Germany there is little of family-life. The members of the family take their coffee separately, as each rises and is ready. The men quite generally dine and sup away from home, and that, too, when their business and their residence are in the same house, and the hotel or eating-house is at a distance. An English gentleman told me of a German friend of his who appeared in his seat in the beer-house on the evening of his wedding-day; and to the suggestion that this was not quite right to the newly married wife, he replied that it did indeed seem so, but he thought it better not to encourage hopes destined to disappointment. This may, too, have been one of those numerous instances in which the parties had already spent many evenings together in such a way as to have diminished the interest of both in each other's society on the first evening of married life. A genuine Munich man would never be embarrassed like the Parisian, of whom the well-known story is told, that, having been accustomed to spend all his evenings in the drawing-room of a certain lady, he was advised, on the death of her husband, to marry her, and promptly replied with the question, "Where, then, should I spend my evenings?" A true South-Bavarian's plan of spending his evenings is not affected by the trifling event of his marriage.
Indeed, there is an aspect of this virtual dissolution of family-life which has great interest as connected with German erudition. The English or American scholar, whose social hours are mainly spent with his family, or in the mixed society of the sexes, would never think of introducing the subjects of his study into such circles, and hence is without the best means of familiarizing his mind with the very topics to which all his hours of close application are devoted; for no subject is fully understood and reduced to material for ready use until it has been in some form the theme of frequent familiar discourse. It is thus turned over,—looked at on every side,—the views of men of different tastes, studies, and orders of mind, who have not disqualified themselves for this by being curled into the same nutshell, are called forth,—and the sparks thus elicited catch on other tinder, which had not been touched by those struck out in solitary study. It is thus that the thoughts of the learned are familiarized, and their area extended. It is thus that subjects which sit upon us as holiday-clothes are, in a society of German literati, who are together every day at dinner, or over their coffee after dinner, and every evening over their beer, become to them as their every-day clothing. I am not of those who deem this result well purchased at the price of the refining influence of the other sex, and the virtual breaking-up of family-life; but if some middle way could be hit upon to secure the two advantages at once, both science and society would be great gainers.
The government has regulated the manufacture of beer, and collected an income-tax upon it, for centuries past; and this is even now one of its most puzzling problems. It determines the price, both wholesale and retail, at which the beer may be sold. The calculations are based upon an estimate of the medium amount of fixed capital necessary for the manufacture, then the labor, then the average price of barley and hops at the October and November markets of each year; every item which enters into the manufacture, including interest at five per cent on capital, enters also into the government's calculation by which it determines its tax and the price of beer. The price is never increased or diminished by less than half a kreutzer, or two pfennigs, that is, one-third of a cent, per mass. The fractional parts of this half-kreutzer which may appear in the calculation are divided by a fixed rule between the public and the brewer: that is, when the fraction is one-fourth of a kreutzer, or less, the brewer must drop it for the public benefit; when more, he may call it a half for his own benefit. The government tax is nearly one kreutzer per mass, making about six millions of florins. There is also in several places an additional local beer-tax, amounting to nearly two million florins more. The population of the kingdom is about five millions. A considerable portion of this population are wine-growing, and manufacture and drink but little beer. Ledlmayr, the largest brewer in Munich, made in the year 1856—the latest statistics published—one hundred and twenty-nine thousand eimers. Allowing three hundred working-days to the year, this would be four hundred and thirty eimers, or twenty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty masses, per day, and would pay to the government, at one kreutzer per mass, one hundred and eighty dollars of our money for each of these working-days, or fifty-four thousand dollars yearly. In a time of popular sensitiveness, there is nothing which the government could do that would be so likely to be followed by a revolutionary outbreak as to add a kreutzer to the price of the mass or quart of beer. This article is ranked in all police-regulations among the necessaries of life. The bakeries and beer-houses must remain open at those holiday-hours when all other shopkeepers, except the apothecaries, must close their shops.