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Mike said.
    I told Mike I’d never met a Big Blue but if I ever did, I’d ask for another bartender.
    Andy drained his beer and bid us goodbye, lugging home a carton of Gasthaus homemade ice cream for his daughter, and Mike handed me a food menu. I’d studied German for three semesters in college and, as I said earlier, traveled in and around Heidelberg for about a week once, but I had no memory of any of these dishes outside of Wiener schnitzel. Some of the choices, like the fried bread dumplings and the five separate herring appetizers with various cream sauces, seemed a little rich. And I didn’t know what to make of jagerschnitzel , described as “two breaded pork cutlets in mushroom sauce with potato dumplings and cabbage.” Jagerschnitzel portended a massive meal. So the Wiener schnitzel it was. It, too, came as a gargantuan heap of food—it could have fed a six-pack of small people, easily. It was tasty but I could only get through about a third of it.
    Around 9:00 P.M. , as the bar started to thin out, I walked out onto the veranda. It was a gorgeous, mild night, summer stars painting a dark, rustic sky. I got invited to sit with the Baumann brothers, Ian and Joel, friendly young locals who hung drywall by day and hunted for good beer at night. Anyone who’s ever hung drywall understands that it’s a tedious, hot, dusty job and thus excellent preparation for beer drinking. We were later joined by Mike, the bartender (whose last name I learned was Seggelke), and Jade Harris, Ian’s girlfriend and a waitress at the Gasthaus. Jade told me that the bar was such a pleasant place to work that her four years there made her the junior person on the staff. One waitress named Billy Jean was a twenty-year veteran.
    I was interested in the Baumanns’ opinion of the place because the Gasthaus crowd I’d seen so far was pretty middle-aged. Ian turned out to be thirty and Joel twenty-seven. Ian said that when he was in the mood just to drink beer and talk, this was his favorite place.
    â€œIt’s very easygoing out here,” he said. “It’s a very civilized notion of beer. It’s not a bunch of young kids just turning twenty-one and seeing how many beers they can pound down.”
    The Baumanns were of the demographic profile that the big beer companies love—males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-four who statistically account for about 60 percent of all beer consumed in beer joints, and who drink 59 percent of all light beer. But they were decidedly not in the light beer camp, and decidedly not America’s typical Bud/Miller/Coors drinkers.
    â€œBud uses rice in its beer,” Ian told me. “That’s a crime. How can you make beer from rice?” (Well, the Bud people say that because the American malt they use is a bit stronger than European malt, using rice helps mellow the beer’s flavor. Of course, some beer purists scoff at this.) On the other hand, the Baumanns conceded that their uncle by marriage, a Bud drinker, was always telling them that they were being far too picky. “My uncle has a saying that any beer is better than no beer,” Ian said. He laughed and then added, “Well, he’s only been my uncle for a year.”
    The Baumanns said that when they didn’t drink here, they sought out places in and around Stillwater that served a burgeoning number of craft beers that had been popping up in the Midwest. They particularly liked Summit, brewed by a small Twin Cities brewer, and were shocked that I hadn’t tried one yet. They let me off the hook when I said I’d just blown into town but made me pledge we’d go find one before the night was over. (Beer people everywhere, I came to learn, were zealously missionary about their local favorites.)
    â€œOh, man, that place rules,” said Ian. “I love their beer. When I die, just put me in a keg at Summit.”
    â€œKinda like our friend