Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Page B

truly wanted to begin at its headwaters at Itasca State Park. In fact, MapQuest told me I faced at least a four-hour drive north by northwest. Beyond that, I knew that the river is but a mere stream at its headwaters, and little resembles the Mighty Mississip’ till it clears the Twin Cities. So I decided I would cop out and start on or near the real river.
    As for beer joints, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Yellow Pages weren’t yielding much more than clutter and confusion when fate seemed to intervene. Rummaging through my downloaded Orbitz travel documents, I stumbled upon a “Things to Do” printout and there was a prospect: Schone’s Gasthaus Bavarian Hunter. “Expect big sausages, large steins of beer, and rowdy polkas at this authentic German beer garden in the charming river town of Stillwater,” the promo said. “If you’re lucky, you’ll stop on polka night.”
    Given the dominance of German-styled lager and the role of German beer barons such as the Busches, Pabsts, Schlitzes, and Millers in shaping—actually, conquering—the American beer market (a matter I deal with in depth later), this seemed an appropriate place to start a quest for the Perfect Beer Joint. When I phoned to get directions, I learned the bar was about a forty-five minute drive east of the Twin Cities. And, alas, this being Saturday, I had missed Polka night by one night.
    Stillwater was as charming as advertised. It sits on the St. Croix River, a tributary to the Mississippi so handsome that it forms part of America’s Wild and Scenic Rivers system. I arrived with the sun sinking behind me in the soft light of dusk and found a low-rise, turn-of-the-century downtown with quaint limestone and brick-front buildings. I later learned that in its nineteenth-century heyday, Still-water, population 16,000, had been a thriving lumber town with obscenely rich lumber barons living in mansions on the bluffs above the river. These days, it is mainly a tourist day-trip destination, with people driving in to take river cruises on period paddle wheelers or to poke around in the town’s sweet shops, rare books and antique stores, and plentiful bars and eateries. The only people who probably aren’t so keen on Stillwater, in fact, are those spending time in its regional state prison.
    The Gasthaus Bavarian, however, wasn’t in Stillwater proper; it lay in splendid isolation, surrounded by cornfields, a goodly ways outside of town. I did notice, as I pulled into its spacious parking lot that seemed about two-thirds full, a sign that warned not to park horses beyond a certain point. I looked around but nary a horse was in sight.
    From the outside, the Gasthaus Bavarian looked like it could be any other Midwestern supper club. Up a broad set of broad wooden steps sat a wide veranda with outdoor seating where a few people sat clustered around tables drinking mugs of beer. Inside, though, the place was bustling and it was like being abruptly tossed into a beer garden in, say, Heidelberg, the place where as a traveler right out of college I was first introduced to robust German lagers. As part of the Gasthaus’s bid for authenticity, the waitstaff all wore traditional Germanic garb, dirndls for the women, lederhosen for the men. The costumes didn’t slow anybody down, though; they were either pouring big mugs of beer from ornate German taps or lugging unbelievably big platters of food to tables that were already crowded with beer and food. And whoever wrote the Orbitz promo wasn’t kidding about the size of the sausages: I saw a platter go by with sausages lolling atop the red cabbage like pythons on a riverbank. Clearly, a lot of beer would be required to soak those things up. The place altogether seemed noisily happy.
    I settled at the end of the bar and was greeted cheerfully by a bartender whose nametag read Mike. The Gasthaus had an impressive array of authentic German beers—and not a