After Yesterday

Adrien Missika - After Yesterday

We arrived near the Schroll Brewerie in Nankendorf just after passing noon on a windy road not much wider than our car. Leading up to town, the road was flanked by an autumn forest and an inner row of reflective white pegs - about one foot tall - perhaps to keep our wandering from bounding off course to follow the river more literally. We parked as usual like a brute on a cobblestone sidewalk, this time below an authoritative but ailing building high on the hill like an elder who speaks no English but watches intently. Nankendorf is like the others, a cluster of houses separated only with tight streets to not waste any farmland surrounding. This same philosophy naturally grows a town this size every 1km or so, similar to thoughtfully spaced crops. And the crops in Franconia are watered with bier. Breweries are strangely sophisticated basement experiments perfected over hundreds of years to produce a unique local brew that is more flavorful and balanced than we deserve in American big gulps. No bottling, no drink specials. Here your grandma would have a familie brewerie and open one of the rooms in her house (complete with fake pink flowers and doiles) as the gasthaus. It's an intimate, family experience that nourishes a town. From inside the gasthaus we grasp tight to our mug and stare out the window. We watch the rain fall steady like the carbonic bubbles rise in the local Vollbier - the Urhell too, though it'll force you to make an inappropriately sour face for the warm countryside and warm host washing glasses and watching TV behind the bar. It's hard to believe that this is the same country whose pride recently ballooned to superiority, who invaded Poland and exterminated it's own citizens. Its hard to understand that the bier brewed and shared here remains like it was 500 years ago, without the taste the auto industry or burger kings or cigarette machines or genocide. Though the hops is grown on vines and poles in the same soil that was torn by bombs only sixty years ago, it seems to have forgotten entirely.

Aimee Mann - Little Tornado (mp3)