A good summer for beer gardens

With the pandemic starting to ease up a little bit, we were able to visit some beer gardens this summer. They were ideal for being outside (indoor restaurants were still closed) and being in a social setting again.

Beer garden in Abensberg

At the end of July we were in Abensberg, just 20 miles upstream of Regensburg on a tributary of the Danube, where the Kuchlbauer brewery is. The brewery has a biergarten with a special attraction: a tower designed by the artist and environmentalist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000, he changed his name from Friedrich Stowasser to "peaceful kingdom hundred waters"). Those of you who have been with us in Vienna will remember the Hundertwasser House and museum in Vienna, where we saw Hundertwasser's art and saw an example of a apartment building where people could live the way he thought people should (closer to nature). He was obsessed with nature and organic forms. He thought a straight line was the devil's work, and he thought trees should have the right to live in the apartments too. 

 

Hundertwasser's tower

You see this sentiment in his tower in the biergarten in Abensberg. There are trees growing out of the windows, and there is a large variety of materials in the construction: some painted surfaces, some tiles, some mirrored pieces, and so on.

 

 

visitor's center

Next door to the brewery is a visitor's center, which is also designed like a Hundertwasser building. The exhibit has some of Hundertwasser's art and sketches, but I was impressed by the amount of information on his environmental viewpoints. 

humus toilet

 

 

 

 

He was a proponent of  humus toilets, which require no water. An example of one was staged inside the left-hand door in the photo. 

visitor's center

 

 

 

 

We watched a contemplative movie of Hundertwasser's life and travels, including his appearance on an Austrian TV show that showcased models of his buildings for living in harmony with the environment.

 

Did I mention the beer is great too?

Weissbier at the Kuchlbauer brewery

On July 18th we went to Ebermannstadt, which is on the edge of the Fraenkische Schweiz near Forchheim and only 45 minutes away by train. We had been to Ebermannstadt before, but we had never

Ebermannstadt biergarten

visited the beer garden. It is very relaxing, on the bank of the  small Wiesent river. The beer garden has great beer, too. 

The Wiesent runs through town, and at one point there is a charming water wheel. The wheel has buckets on it that bring water up out of the river and tip into a trough. The trough then leads away into the town.

water wheel with buckets and trough