Tourist magnets and expectations

Whenever you visit a new place you come around at least one restaurants or sight that feel strange. A place that is somehow historically significant (or at least interesting) yet has devolved into something that is purely there for tourists and therefore doesn’t really provide a proper cultural representation anymore. For some reason, though, that place still gets high ratings on platforms like Google Maps but if you dig deeper, you notice that very few of these reviews were written by locals.

While visiting Salzburg last week, we ran into one such place: Augustiner Bräu Mülln. It’s a brewery associated with a monastery that operates a combination of beer hall and beer garden.

Disclaimer: Please note that this comment is based on a single visit there. I vould be totally wrong and it could just have been that particular day, but these were my thoughts after the visit and with a couple of days to think about it.

I love a good beer garden and I like food markets where you pick and choose from various booths to get exactly the kind of food that you’re looking for at that time; where you pick up your drink from a bar and you return a place that you’ve left your folks at to reserve the place for you.

Augustiner Bräu Mülln tries to be such a place but fails at the scale of international tourism. It does not fail at the quality of food or the beer. The beer is cheap (esp. for Salzburg) and fine but a bit bland, and the food stalls offer pretty much any better known Austrian meat dish you’d get a butcher plus some salads, sweets, and other vegetarian options at an average quality. The big problem with this place is that it feels like a huge tourist trap. Groups of folks are basically moved through those hallways probably as some kind of travel package to learn about the local (beer) culture. And yes, there is a place for beer halls especially the closer you get to Bavaria but what made my experience there just so bad was the way the beer was handled.

When you enter through the main entrance you are greeted by a wall of mugs (0.5l and 1l). You pick one and then head left. There is a fountain where you can wash your mug if you’re re-using it and then you go to teller to pay for your beer. A few steps behind that person handling a barrel will fill your mug. It’s quite foamy so there will be lots of split not only on the tray but also once you move away from there again. That spill goes to the floor. Lots of it. The floor is constantly sticky and wet from the beer simply because there is no time to let the drink settle and clean the mugs before people have to move out again to let others through. I’d recommend rain boots in case you want to visit but just imagine what that would be like during the summer months when people use sandals etc.

They also don’t really offer any kind of guidance to outside visitors. You are expected to know what to do there and how things work. You learn by observing others and accidentally blocking others until you have the necessary knowledge. Only cash is accepted, signage at the food stalls is primarily in German but at least some sheet of paper with also the English names of the meals.

Perhaps, when the weather is fine, this is handled differently. Perhaps the floor is cleaned more often then, but I don’t see that given the tight space there and the need to sell quickly and a lot of it.

On the next day we went to another brewery which comes with its own beer hall + beer garden experience: Stiegl Brauwelt. Stiegl is the largest independent brewery in Austria. The hall is much smaller, not lending itself to mass tourism. The beer is still served if you sit inside as is the food. For the outside area there is a dedicated bar most likely with self-service that is open if the weather allows it. We primarily had rain, so no outdoor seating for us 😔 The Brauwelt is definitely also attractive to tourists. I’d assume that unless they go to the restaurants and focus on the museum, any local will visit it at most once and then move on. Still, it felt far less touristy than the old monastery brewery plus beer hall. Both have with around 4800 and 3900 pretty much the same amount of reviews on Google Maps and the same 4.5 score. We left only one of them with a feeling of utter disappointment.