The bar is the mythical place where they all come together and tell their stories: the loiterers and binge drinkers, lonely women and loquacious boozers, fusspots, misanthropes, braggarts, loudmouths, wastrels, moochers and sympathetic clowns at the margins of our society. Their stories are just as nutty and heartbreaking, bawdy and dramatic, desolate and tragicomic as they are.
Author Bernd Imgrund spent 100 days travelling around the country, visiting small towns and their local pubs, listening to the regulars and collecting their stories. Interweaved with the origins of gastronomic history as well as the cultural history of each location, he paints a picture of pub culture in Germany that rarely finds its way into the news or into literature.
For the benefit of his notes, he follows one ironclad rule: No beer before four. Ironclad? Well...
