On Monday, as I was contemplating What Columbus Means to Me and feeling gratitude and warmth toward the American Congress for funding this particular holiday, we took a tour of Vienna's Ottakringer Brewery. To identify us as paying visitors, the brewery gave us each a lanyard with a yellow card reading "BLOPP! Stage Pass." I don't know what it means, but I do like the sound, which makes me think of spilled beer hitting the floor.
The brewery is a brick and wooden bridge from the days of Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Sisi to the present. For the revolutionaries of 1848, the residences of the Habsburgs most likely spoke of a society that, in many ways, fit Faulkner's paradigm of the American South--the palaces here are versions of Southern plantations, relics of a caste system, built by the impoverished for the pretty porcelain elite. And today palace tourist audioguides speak of an idealized past--as they recreate what never was. The Ottakringer Brewery, on the other hand, is a functional, living monument to the past that was. Built in 1837, the brewery grounds contain a lovely old red-brick, blue-collar palace, which produced a golden palliative for a grimy existence with 12-hour workdays; currently the beverage it produces washes down many a sausage and potato on the tables of Wiener World, as well as my Sunday-night pizza at Nino's of Grinzing. Ottakringer remains a low-rent district, an area that has been occupied mainly by workers since the Industrial Revolution, and, before that, hosted a Turkish encampment during the 1683 siege of Vienna. (To this day are the Viennese are grateful for the kebap stands that the Turks were forced to leave behind. These stands also sell Ottakringer beer.) One historian referred to the Ottakringer district as a "grim industrial neighborhood" at the time of Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. During the years of occupation after the war, the brewery survived in the Russian zone of the city, which ensured continued impoverishment, though it has grown more prosperous since Austria's independence in 1955.
Our back-stage tour had the brewery's gift shop for a staging area. Organized by one of the Embassy's offices, our group of more than 30 massed at noon in that plain and simple space lined with metal shelves and with a concrete floor--and the panache of a high school locker room. The shelves displayed different kinds of Ottakringer beer--though not many different kinds--and yellow-and-black T-shirts and beer glasses. We tourists milled about and chit-chatted in small groups, eying the closely-cropped heads and shiny black suits of the Ambassador's security detail, and trying to discern the outline of weapons under their coats. We hoped for no drama.
Soon a young man in jeans and a baseball cap with an Ottakringer logo led us off through a double door and into a parking lot to hear the history of the brewery, essentially a narrative identifying a succession of proprietors; he passed quickly over the business being seized from its Jewish owners during the Nazi years, and growing prosperous after the war. Up and down staircases we went, redolent of sweet yeast and bitter hops; we paused to look down at metal silos, huge cylinders, and fast-moving belts conveying cans, filled and unfilled, at very high or very low temperatures, through different stages of filling and pasteurization. Of the lecture on the brewing process itself, I recall only this: "The yeasts are tiny animals that fart CO2 and piss alcohol." As the guide said this, he looked directly at the Ambassador to determine whether that choice of English verbs amounted to a breach of decorum--with a tiny smirk suggesting his hope that it did. (The return gaze was, however, diplomatically impassive.) As the tour concluded, we were led up more stairs to the "party room."
We closed with a cast party, ourselves the players, in a fire trap in an attic--disguised as beer hall. The floors were of wood, as were rows of picnic tables; the ceiling was made of planks held up by rough-cut beams that I am guessing (from the cut marks) were made more than a hundred years ago. At one end of the room stood a bar and two sets of taps. Although our BLOPP cards had little tabs to be torn off and deposited for up to four sample glasses of different kinds of beer, no one was counting. Soon a large basket of large, fresh, warm pretzels appeared on a table top, and the tour closed on a social hour.
The last act involved trying to find our way out. We first tried to leave the room the way we had come in, but we were stopped by an employee and directed toward another exit. We found our way down a wooden hall and some wooden stairs into an uncharted parking lot. For the next 10-15 minutes we bobbed about the premises, like little ships at sea, randomly passing and re-passing other groups of four-to-six people who also were unable to navigate back to the street. Every turn brought us to a high fence or building wall, and we imagined we were from time to time passing ships from tours of years past. Finally we found a truck gate and exited, exultant at seeing the outside world again. We went full circle, making our way back to the gift shop to pick up souvenir glasses and T-shirts, much as I imagine Columbus to have done at a Carib Indian gift shop before his return voyage, to prove he had been there.
The brewery is a brick and wooden bridge from the days of Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Sisi to the present. For the revolutionaries of 1848, the residences of the Habsburgs most likely spoke of a society that, in many ways, fit Faulkner's paradigm of the American South--the palaces here are versions of Southern plantations, relics of a caste system, built by the impoverished for the pretty porcelain elite. And today palace tourist audioguides speak of an idealized past--as they recreate what never was. The Ottakringer Brewery, on the other hand, is a functional, living monument to the past that was. Built in 1837, the brewery grounds contain a lovely old red-brick, blue-collar palace, which produced a golden palliative for a grimy existence with 12-hour workdays; currently the beverage it produces washes down many a sausage and potato on the tables of Wiener World, as well as my Sunday-night pizza at Nino's of Grinzing. Ottakringer remains a low-rent district, an area that has been occupied mainly by workers since the Industrial Revolution, and, before that, hosted a Turkish encampment during the 1683 siege of Vienna. (To this day are the Viennese are grateful for the kebap stands that the Turks were forced to leave behind. These stands also sell Ottakringer beer.) One historian referred to the Ottakringer district as a "grim industrial neighborhood" at the time of Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. During the years of occupation after the war, the brewery survived in the Russian zone of the city, which ensured continued impoverishment, though it has grown more prosperous since Austria's independence in 1955.
Our back-stage tour had the brewery's gift shop for a staging area. Organized by one of the Embassy's offices, our group of more than 30 massed at noon in that plain and simple space lined with metal shelves and with a concrete floor--and the panache of a high school locker room. The shelves displayed different kinds of Ottakringer beer--though not many different kinds--and yellow-and-black T-shirts and beer glasses. We tourists milled about and chit-chatted in small groups, eying the closely-cropped heads and shiny black suits of the Ambassador's security detail, and trying to discern the outline of weapons under their coats. We hoped for no drama.
Soon a young man in jeans and a baseball cap with an Ottakringer logo led us off through a double door and into a parking lot to hear the history of the brewery, essentially a narrative identifying a succession of proprietors; he passed quickly over the business being seized from its Jewish owners during the Nazi years, and growing prosperous after the war. Up and down staircases we went, redolent of sweet yeast and bitter hops; we paused to look down at metal silos, huge cylinders, and fast-moving belts conveying cans, filled and unfilled, at very high or very low temperatures, through different stages of filling and pasteurization. Of the lecture on the brewing process itself, I recall only this: "The yeasts are tiny animals that fart CO2 and piss alcohol." As the guide said this, he looked directly at the Ambassador to determine whether that choice of English verbs amounted to a breach of decorum--with a tiny smirk suggesting his hope that it did. (The return gaze was, however, diplomatically impassive.) As the tour concluded, we were led up more stairs to the "party room."
We closed with a cast party, ourselves the players, in a fire trap in an attic--disguised as beer hall. The floors were of wood, as were rows of picnic tables; the ceiling was made of planks held up by rough-cut beams that I am guessing (from the cut marks) were made more than a hundred years ago. At one end of the room stood a bar and two sets of taps. Although our BLOPP cards had little tabs to be torn off and deposited for up to four sample glasses of different kinds of beer, no one was counting. Soon a large basket of large, fresh, warm pretzels appeared on a table top, and the tour closed on a social hour.
The last act involved trying to find our way out. We first tried to leave the room the way we had come in, but we were stopped by an employee and directed toward another exit. We found our way down a wooden hall and some wooden stairs into an uncharted parking lot. For the next 10-15 minutes we bobbed about the premises, like little ships at sea, randomly passing and re-passing other groups of four-to-six people who also were unable to navigate back to the street. Every turn brought us to a high fence or building wall, and we imagined we were from time to time passing ships from tours of years past. Finally we found a truck gate and exited, exultant at seeing the outside world again. We went full circle, making our way back to the gift shop to pick up souvenir glasses and T-shirts, much as I imagine Columbus to have done at a Carib Indian gift shop before his return voyage, to prove he had been there.
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