LA eateries merge American culture with German cuisine

Think of the classic American backyard party: You crack open an ice-cold bottle of Miller Lite and swig it down while poking at hotdogs sizzling on an outdoor grill. The day is warm, sweetened by a glug of cool fizziness. It’s lazy, it’s relaxing and it’s social.

Oktoberfest has several hundred times more fun and energy. Traditionally held for 16 to 18 days during the last weeks of September to the first weekend of October, this messy, raucous festival is attended by several million people gathering over tens of thousands of bottles of beer and wursts.

As crazy as it sounds, everyday German beer drinking actually holds a sensible seriousness toward good food and drink. Historically, many breweries in Germany were managed by monks. Oktoberfest is just a two-week exception for people to tap into their inner frat boys under the excuse of tradition.

While beer is mainly a social drink in American culture, beer in Germany is ingrained into the psyche. Centuries ago, the waters were so polluted the people drank beer with their meals as their liquids, and that tradition has stuck for generations. In fact, beer is such a common beverage in Germany that it is often served alongside McNuggets at McDonald’s.

Unlike popular American beers, German beer shares the kind of tradition and artistry typically devoted to wine. Every brewery has its own secret recipe and signature style, and the majority of beer, like Oktoberfest beer, is seasonal and regional. Warm summer weather calls for light and hoppy ale, while fall’s brisker air rouses cravings for the roasted, caramelized malt of Oktoberfest beers.

The belief used to be that American beer tastes like piss and Americans drink beer merely for the brand, but there’s a revolution underway in American beer culture.

While German brewing and beer consumption is dropping — to the distress of many proud German traditionalists, who gloomily labeled the phenomenon as brauereisterben, literally “brewery death” — consumption of specialty craft beers in America has been steadily rising, despite declines in sales for core beer brands like Budweiser.

This dichotomy suggests Americans are developing a more sophisticated taste for quality beers; it’s no longer a bubbly filler, but a serious beverage meant to be enjoyed for its distinct complexities. Some are so passionate about beer they’ve even taken up home brewing and blogging about it.

In Los Angeles alone, it seems every other week there’s a new beer garden popping up, each sharing a passion for great beer but with distinct themes in food and beer pairing.

The most famous staple, of course, is wursts. Wurst, or German processed meat, is one of the essential components in Oktoberfest, but not the main definition of German cuisine. Still, it is the perfect complement to German beer — both are manly, casual and incredibly diverse.

The most common wurst is the bratwurst, a blend of finely ground pork and veal stuffed into casing, but there are more than 100 other varieties, including spreadable leberwurst and cold-cuts usually served with dense bread. In Los Angeles, wursts take the more common form of encased sausages, but can be re-encased in innovative ways.

The popular Wurstküche, which likely initiated the whole wurst and beer revolution with its 2008 opening in Little Tokyo, blends together exotic meats, such as rattlesnake and rabbit, with untraditional spices. Its pairing of unusual wursts and traditional German beers gained huge popularity, so much that it now boasts a second location in Venice.

Ever since Wurstküche sparked the beer hall Liebe across the city, other pubs featuring sausages and beer emerged, such as Steingarten LA on Pico Boulevard, Brats Brothers in Sherman Oaks and Wirtshaus in West Hollywood.

The gastropub Biergarten in Koreatown brings a creative spin by fusing authentic German ingredients into Korean dishes. The German fried rice created by Chef Eddie Hah, for example, is a wok toss of rice with spicy Kolbasa sausage, sauerkraut and spaten dunkel-infused gravy, topped with a runny fried egg.

Biergarten, which opened last year, also features an impressive beer menu that includes seasonal brews, like Sparten Oktoberfest and Hacker Pschorr Oktoberfest, and makes everything in-house, from sauerkrauts to sizzling fat sausages to mouth-watering mustards in which you dip the juicy meats.

Currywurst, a ubiquitous Berlin street food, has also recently infiltrated Los Angeles streets. Berlin Currywurst in Silver Lake, which opened in spring, was the first to introduce this Indian/British/German concoction. Since then, a shop called Currywurst opened up on Fairfax Avenue, serving the same minimal menu of wurst doused in a tomato-based sauce with dashes of curry powder. Neither establishment serves beer because the stalls are too small for a liquor license, a glaring difference between Los Angeles and Germany.

Still, other beer-aficionados have innovated by breaking away from the four wall restraint of stalls. ColLAboration, a mobile craft beer garden, roams the city featuring buzz-worthy events centered on specialty craft beers. And for beer-lovers who want to turn passion into hobby, Culver City and Eagle Rock have home brewing supply stores that offer home brewing classes.

Oktoberfest might be over, but there are still plenty of places to drink and eat the German way. So fill your cup, drink it down, smile with your foam moustache, and cry, “Auf Wiedersehen!”

 

Sophia Lee is a junior majoring in print and digital journalism and East Asian languages and cultures. Her column “Cross Bites” runs Mondays.