Keferloher
The Keferloher is a barrel-shaped (not bulbous), gray, salzglasierter stoneware - Stein , who, thanks to its characteristics, especially for the enjoyment of beer is. Due to the insulating effect of the clay , the beer stays cool longer, and due to the special surface structure that is created by adding salt during the distillation process, the carbon dioxide stays in the drink longer and the beer stays fresh longer.
history
The term Keferloh goes back to the place Keferloh , today a district of Grasbrunn , where an annual market known as Keferloh Monday has been held since 1325 . The market was discovered around 1800 by authors, painters and reporters as primeval and represented in countless written sources and contemporary illustrations. It was the largest gathering of people in the Kingdom of Bavaria until the Oktoberfest surpassed it in the middle of the 19th century.
The historical jug from Keferloh
The sources from the first half of the 19th century unanimously represent a lidless, straight beer mug for the Keferloher market, which is designed for the consumption of a drinker.
It is also noteworthy that in contemporary reports it is regularly mentioned that there are particularly frequent fights at the Keferloh market in which the beer mug is used as a "cutting and throwing weapon". In contrast to various archive documents from other Bavarian judicial districts, there is not a single documented case in which a beer mug in Keferloh and the surrounding area ( Ebersberg district court ) resulted in a fatal injury. Fatalities in brawls on the Keferloher market only occurred in the form of knife stabs.
A historical beer mug can be reconstructed from this, which had a straight wall, was manufactured without a lid and whose material broke much more easily than the usual mugs of its time. Such a jug was not preserved in any stoneware collection.
And it stood in contrast to the jugs preserved as artefacts and described many times in contemporary and later specialist literature. Because at the beginning of the 19th century, between 1809 and 1811, the administration of the Kingdom of Bavaria introduced a uniform measure of capacity for beer, the Munich Maßkanne, also called Mass , with a defined content of 1069 ml. It replaced the more than 95 previous dimensions of the various regions of Bavaria, including the areas that were recently added to Bavaria. This normalization coincided with two other, roughly simultaneous changes. On the one hand, in the first third of the 19th century, Bavaria selectively settled stoneware manufacturers from the Westerwald in various agricultural regions of Bavaria with suitable clay deposits and, on the other hand, the drinking habits in inns changed from drinking together from a large jug per table to individual drinking vessels with smaller ones Volume, after 1811 the Bavarian measure of 1069 ml. With the spread of the railroad, stoneware beer mugs were also imported to Bavaria on a large scale directly from the Westerwald. These jugs were made of sintered stoneware, gray in color and almost always had a drawn-in lip on the upper edge. They always had a tin lid.
An archaeological excavation in Keferloh in April, July and August 2000 revealed for the first time finds of the wanted jug. Around 1900 fragments of earthenware belonged to a massively and cheaply produced beer mug with an average height of 19 cm with a 10.7 cm base and 8.9 cm top diameter and a volume of 1100 ml. It was straight-walled with isolated external dents and internal traces of of manufacture, a simple handle without a mounting hole for a lid. Since earthenware is not waterproof, the jugs were covered with a lead glaze on the inside and over the edge to the outside to around the base of the handle. The rest of the jug could hold water, which was used to cool the contents. When the jug was immersed in water for rinsing, it absorbed liquid, which then cooled the jug as it evaporated . After firing at a low temperature of around 700 ° C, the material was a light red-orange shade, the glazes fluctuated between red, green, yellow and brown tones. In Keferloh itself there is no clay deposits in the immediate area but in 1900 five Hafner a variety of large pottery manufacturers, within a large radius proven. The name Keferloher for this jug in Keferloh is nowhere known. It may have occurred regionally due to the great importance of the market, including for early forms of tourism, but it cannot be proven.
The Keferloher
With the unification of the empire in 1871, responsibility for weights and measures was transferred to the empire. In Bavaria, too, the 1000 ml liter, which was already widespread in Prussia, was introduced. At the same time, the hospitality industry was characterized by ever larger companies. The beer halls and beer gardens had taken an upswing with the population growth in medium-sized and larger cities. For these companies, lidded jugs were no longer attractive because of the higher purchase and maintenance price and the greater effort involved in washing up.
It has been proven that Georg Pschorr or his entourage at the end of the 1870s called the lidless stoneware jug with a capacity of 1 l introduced in his factories as Keferloher . This is considered an “ingenious idea”, because in this way the unloved, smaller jug identified with Prussia, but offered at the same price, was linked to the traditional, well-known and popular Keferloh festival. The term Keferloher established itself within a few years in large-scale catering, at the Oktoberfest, in beer gardens and cellars as well as at public festivals and in similar places . These mugs mostly had an imprint or a stamped motif of the brewery. The first large beer hall at Oktoberfest was equipped in 1896 by the Schottenhamel family with 400 Keferlohern and 50 mugs with lids for special guests.
Today's Keferloher
The earthenware jug is available in two versions, on the one hand in the more common version without a lid, on the other hand in the one with a (mostly flat) tin lid.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the clay drinking vessels were discovered by breweries for advertising purposes. From then on, the brewers poured their beer at festivals or in their own inns in mugs that revealed the origin of the beer. First the breweries scratched the name relatively primitively with nails or pointed objects in the clay before firing, later jugs are much more elaborately designed, modeled or artistically printed. Even today, breweries still have their own clay beer mugs made. Above all, old, and partly also today's jugs, are in great demand among collectors and are sold at high prices. There are now counterfeit pieces of the coveted rare old jugs.
Brewery pitchers
Type of lettering:
- Incised: they are among the oldest; the writing is carved into the clay
- Plastic: they are modeled and processed in three dimensions
- Stenciled jugs
- Chiselled: very rare
- Colored: some artfully painted jugs
- Lay on: the letters are laid on the clay and then burned in
- Printed: the first jugs of this type appear from around 1910
The temporal transitions are fluid, before 1920 the jugs were hand-turned, then some were machine-made. Until 1955, when the new calibration marks were introduced, jugs are considered historical. The historical jugs have a small or large "L" attached one centimeter below the rim of the jar as a calibration mark. Today, a calibration mark is required four centimeters below the top of the jug. No beer / drink may be served in old mugs for a fee.
Oktoberfest
Until the clay jugs were gradually replaced by glass jugs at the Oktoberfest from 1892 for hygienic reasons, millions of Keferloher clay were produced annually for the Munich spectacle. The glass jugs also have the advantage that you can see exactly whether the prescribed amount is actually being poured.
Keferloher have been made by hand for the Oktoberfest since 1978, but now as a souvenir item with the Oktoberfest poster motif that changes every year. On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Oktoberfest in 2010, the specially brewed dark anniversary beer was served in specially made half-liter and liter Keferlohern at the "Historischen Wiesn".
literature
- Siegfried Rübensaal: Keferloh, Keferloher, keferloherisch - notes on an old Bavarian beer myth . In: ders .: On stoneware production in pre-industrial Bavaria . Yearbook of the Johann Andreas Schmeller Society 2011. Edition Vulpes 2012, ISBN 978-3-939112-73-0 , pp. 172-201.
- 1516 - 500 years of the Bavarian Purity Law. Publication of the Straubinger Tagblatt / Landshuter Zeitung media group , January 22nd, 2016, cycling campaign: Jürgen Hirtreiter, printing: Cl. Attenkofer'sche book and art print, publishing house of the Straubinger Tagblatt.
- Siegfried Rübensaal: Bavaria and its beer mug. In: Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 2007, published by the Commission for Bavarian State History at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, pp. 21–31.
Web links
- A house full of beer mugs (4000 Keferloher)
- The Keferloher - the Bavarian original mug
- Making and history of the jug