Atlanta, Georgia’s Halfway Crooks Beer features an upstairs beer hall and an outdoor beer garden. Both are furnished with tables and matching benches that are familiar to anyone who has ever visited a beer garden in Germany. The furniture is simple in design, yet it has a unique look that instantly identifies the space it occupies as a place to have beer — lager beer … with friends … in quantity.
Halfway Crooks purchased their furniture secondhand and it still bears stamps indicating the year of manufacture (2005) and the beer garden for which they were originally made. Shawn Cooper, co-founder of Halfway Crooks, says he gets emails from customers thanking them for having the furniture, which reminds them of their time spent in beer gardens in Germany when they lived or visited there.
The tables are so closely identified with German beer culture, one is tempted to yell “Prost” upon seeing them.
The history of bierkellers and biergartens
Scott Burgess, owner and founder of Bierkeller Columbia in South Carolina, spent ten years living in Franconia. “The landscape is rolling hills and the soil is sandstone,” he says. “Historically, every landowner got brewing rights and beer would be stored in caves carved into the sandstone. Chestnut trees were planted to provide a blanket of shade to keep the land and the beer caves beneath cool.”
“People would go out to get beer to bring home, so the breweries started putting out tables and benches for them to have a beer in the shade of the chestnut trees before heading home,” says Burgess. In Franconia, those areas are known as “bierkellers,” but when the idea spread elsewhere in Bavaria, they became known as “biergartens.”
The history of the tables and benches themselves is merely that they are simple, collapsible and built to last. A standard beer garden table is 220 centimeters long and just 50 centimeters wide (or 87 by 20 inches) and comes with two benches, each measuring 220 centimeters by 25 centimeters. The fact that the benches are exactly half the width of the table is no accident. After the busy Oktoberfest season or for winter storage, two folded-down benches rest on one folded-down table, making warehousing easy — tables and benches can be stacked and transported together uniformly.
Good ones — there are cheap knock-offs — are built to last. During beer garden season, they are left out all day and night, exposed to the elements. And during festival season, both benches and tables must bear the weight of jovial patrons — yes, people stand on them — large quantities of beers in heavy glass or ceramic maßkrugs, and food.
Burgess says that the tables and benches at Bierkeller are as good as new, despite their age and having been sent over in a container ship. Their furniture bears the Paulaner logo and the most maintenance one might need is a coat of paint.
Beware the seesaw
There is no doubt that German beer garden benches are well-designed. But one odd “feature” of them is that the legs are set in about one foot from the end. And being constructed of a single plank of spruce, the benches aren’t heavy.
Unsuspecting customers often sit down on the end of a bench, only to cause the bench to seesaw if nobody is already sitting on it. Many beers have suffered tragic spillages due to such accidents.
Worse, someone might sit on the end of a bench and feel secure, unaware that when the occupant at the other end of the bench stands up, an embarrassing seesaw incident awaits. Cue the epic fail video.
The only time it is safe to sit on the end of a bench is when there are multiple other patrons sitting on the same bench. Those benches are not just economical and communal. They also test your knowledge of physics.
Why the tables are key to the beer garden experience
German beer culture is built on revelry. The long tables and benches require sharing, and their narrow width means you are face-to-face with the person sitting across from you. In a noisy beer hall, that makes it easier to talk or make hearty toasts.
“It’s hard to sit across from someone and stare at your phone,” says Chris Lohring, owner and head brewer at Notch Brewing, which has locations in Brighton and Salem, Massachusetts. “You have to talk to each other.”
“In Salem, we have a significant tourist population and we see them talking to and meeting locals all the time,” says Lohring. “Or people just meet each other here. We really wanted to make this a social place and the tables are a big part of that.”
The legs on each end of the tables and benches come as an attached pair, forming a flattened U-shape and spanning the width of the table or bench. This provides maximum stability given the narrowness of the furniture. In a crowded beerhall, the benches will touch each other, back-to-back, and the benches will be up against the tables. This means:
– Bruised knees and shins are common
– You might have to walk on the bench to get to the middle
– When seated, your back might brush the back of the person behind you at the next table
– The tables and benches are incredibly stable when stood and danced upon
– You will make friends
Bars that have chosen these tables do so purposefully. They are trying to recreate the German beer drinking culture that brings people together as equal friends. “In a German bierkeller, everyone is drinking the same beer, sitting at the same table, chatting and singing the same song,” says Burgess. “It’s just a neat aspect that adds to a unique beer culture. And the table and benches definitely contribute to it.”
Stateside, most breweries and bars serve more than one beer. But these breweries and bars with German-style tables and benches generally serve lagers in full-size servings. You won’t find people with beer flights checking into Untappd here.
What you will find instead are friendly, beer-loving people enjoying beer as part of a greater experience of enjoying the company of others. “When you walk into a place with these tables and benches, expectations are different,” says Burgess.
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Don Tse
Living near seven malthouses, Don Tse is a freelance beer and malt writer and consultant known globally as The Don of Beer. He has been active in craft beer for over 25 years and has famously sampled and written tasting notes on almost 27,000 different beers. He is the co-host of the All About Beer podcast. Don has also written for magazines and presented on beer in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ukraine and Singapore. Nobody in those countries thinks his jokes are funny.