Recently, there's been a sprouting of Beer Gardens around the City, none, as far as I know, in Manhattan. The largest is in Long Island City, in Queens. The closest to us is in Williamsburg, and we attended it for the first time after our jaunt to Ward's Island.
I think one reason there aren't any Biergartens in Manhattan is that a beer garden is basically a copy of the Hofbrau Haus in Munich. For people who know me, I don't like using the English names for German cities, but I can't get the damn umlaut to show up on my blog...In any case, the Hofbrau Haus has high ceilings being held by large curving beams of thick wood, and plenty of sturdy picnic table-style seating areas. In Manhattan, space is too premium for that kind of openness, that style of loud, airy alcohol fueled camaraderie.
There was something of an annoyance, to me anyway, when I ordered the only drinks Corrie and I got at this Biergarten, one each of the Hof Brau Dunkel liters. Nothing beats a quart of dark beer after a long day of hiking around uptown. I ambled to the bar, having already seen that they carried the Hof Brau brand, and having already decided on what I was ordering, the tender asked me what'd I want.
I told him, "Two liters; Hof Brau Dunkel" and I pronounced it all correctly, even the "doo-nk-el", with the hard "ooh" sound that the German attach to the vowel "u". It was sorta loud and all, but he squinted and said, "The HB dunk-el?" with a pronunciation reminiscent of the basketball play, the slam "dunk"...
Ooh, that grated on my nerves. For one, treating Hof Brau beer as a simple brand, "HB" (since that's the logo on all the liter mugs and coasters and t-shirts, etc.), and then the repeated mis-pronunciation of "doo-nkel" as "dunk-el", repeated I mean by everyone else in the place, from bar-maidens to the other patrons...
To me, that was almost as annoying as the prevalence of toddlers running around. Toddlers, running around, causing havoc, being chased by beer-swilling overprotective parents, at least a half-dozen of them! I may be overprotective too if I had my daughter, a few weeks past learning to walk, running wild around a hundred large, drunken, and obnoxious hipsters, but, I may think twice before bringing my babies to a bar. But see, this isn't a bar, this is a Biergarten.
In Deutschland's Biergartens of course the little kiddies are there, but at least they give 'em Radlers (again, damn the lack of umlauts). Radler is a German drink they make for kids, to get them to consume their necessary beer quota for the day, a mix of about fifty-fifty beer and lemonade. This is not a joke. The kids behave, they're mellow, and when they're teenagers, there's no taboo associated with drinking, and they don't feel like slamming beers at keggers and then driving home. It seems to have created a strange class of folks with knowledge of responsible alcohol consumption...
Don't get me wrong, we did enjoy ourselves, and if we lived closer, we might frequent the establishment a little more.
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