The "Beer & Brat" Factor: Mega Cities & the Ancient Rule of Neighborliness

I will explain how to properly cook bratwurst, but first you should know just what you’re dealing with.

Indirectly, brats were the inspiration for Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy and subsequently immortalized by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Schiller settled in Weimar in 1782. He was so overwhelmed by the city’s famous onion festival – not at all unlike Milwaukee’s Summer Fest -- that he wrote his celebrated poem, on the unity of all mankind, only a few short years later in 1785.

Milwaukee is a beer and brat kind of town. That’s not a disparaging put down. It is a banner we should rally around. Call it the “beer and brat factor.” In German they say gemütlichkeit. Wendell Berry champions it as the “ancient rule of neighborliness.”

Relatively speaking, throughout the Great Lakes, Upper Midwest “rust belt,” Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan coastline is doing fine. The cities and towns along the shore have had the good fortune to incorporate the humble bratwurst firmly into the local food culture.  

It is one of the ties that bind. It’s not the only one, but the “beer and brat factor” is powerful engine driving a certain sense of neighborly wellbeing from which all sorts of good things follow.

Think of the televised Packer game. Green Bay is a meatpacking, paper mill town – rust belt in every way. It’s featured on national television regularly. Each time, we are reminded that Green Bay is the smallest NFL city and the Packers are the only publicly owned NFL team. We are told Green Bay is an unusually charmed place, almost magical. We are told as football fans we should make a “pilgrimage” to Lambeau Field for a game. (link) 

But the magic isn’t in the stadium. It’s at the tailgate parties that transform the surrounding neighborhoods into a massive block party. This is of course is only part of the NFL story line. It’s a bit of local color accompanying the game. Nevertheless, the real story is a town whose residents quit whatever their doing, at least eight times a year, to hold a giant block party and transform a football game into a festival. The game is only an excuse.

Think of bratwurst, tent parties and city celebrations and you’ll find Green Bay has a lot in common with Vienna, Austria.

Gazing further down the coast from Green Bay, not far from Sheboygan, Kohler has become an international destination for golfers and Road America is regarded as one of the best road racing venues in the world. Sheboygan is the bratwurst capital of the United States.

For those of us who live here there doesn’t seem to be anything unusual in all of that. Green Bay, Sheboygan, and Milwaukee are simply regular beer and brat kind of places. Yet all too typically, upper Midwest industrial cities have wilted away into shadows of their former past. Milwaukee, we were told by Forbes Magazine earlier this year, is a top ten “comeback city.” A thoughtful resident of the area, between bites of a succulent brat, might rightly ask: “has comeback from what?”

For nearly forty years or longer, the story of the upper Mid-West and Great Lakes urban centers has been one of decline. In some places now, the renewal plan begins and ends with a bulldozer. (link) “Rust Belt” they say.  

The story here is not about relative health of metropolitan areas. It’s about the urban centers, the cities, anchoring those areas. The City of St. Louis’ population peaked at around 875,000. It’s now 319,294. Cleveland was once 910,000 and is now 396,815. Buffalo once had 580,000 residents. Now there are 261,310.

The City of Milwaukee’s population peaked during the post war boom in the early 1960s at around 740,000. It is 594,833 now. And much of that modest decline can largely be attributed to smaller families and subsequently smaller households. Throughout that time metropolitan area kept growing. There were no booms here and no great busts either. There really hasn’t been a comeback or massive decline to come back from. Instead, Milwaukee has just slowly evolved.

That’s where the beer and brat factor comes in. Neighborliness is part and parcel with our beer and brat food culture. Amiable neighborly gatherings, the festivals large and small, and the civility they engender are the lifeblood of a city.

In German it’s called gemütlichkeit. It embodies both place and state of mind that roughly translates into our popular expression “life is good.” It is the relaxed, cheerful atmosphere of the neighborhood tavern, the block party, the church festival, of brew pubs, backyard BBQs, and the beer garden. It is an expression of what Wendell Berry would call the “the ancient rule of neighborliness.”

”I think that it could be the beginning of the renewal of our country, for the renewal of rural communities ultimately implies the renewal of urban ones. But to be authentic, a true encouragement and a true beginning, this would have to be a resurrection accomplished mainly by the community itself. It would have to be done, not from the outside by the instruction of visiting experts, but from the inside by the ancient rule of neighborliness, by the love of precious things, and by the wish to be at home.” (Full text)

The mechanics of Berry’s ancient rule are on full display throughout the greater Milwaukee area. Check out this video on Milwaukee’s Lincoln Village neighborhood. Lincoln Avenue is a historic Milwaukee neighborhood main street. It’s had its ups and downs. It’s a place where immigrant polish roots have combined with a new found Latino vitality into a lively and interesting neighborhood commercial center. It shows Milwaukee’s evolution. Lincoln Avenue isn’t unique.

Neighborliness implies the scale of a neighborhood or small town. It is the proper human scale for social and economic commerce.   

Everywhere the trend is away from that scale of neighborliness. Nothing is overtly malicious in this, but rather, it’s the unintended consequence of the economics of aggregation. Neighborliness is under assault.  

Too often, economy of scale is thought of as economic efficiency gained through largeness. It’s a mindset that permeates contemporary culture, government and commerce. The economics of a complex society often necessarily force a scale of almost unimaginable largeness upon us. But as often, it’s embraced with good intentions, but little need and little gain. Too often it ends in a disaster that’s quickly swept under the rug. How long have huge, centralized, urban school districts been mostly a disaster?

New to our public policy lexicon is “too big to fail.”

In that light, the economy of scale should reflect the more difficult notion of the economy of proper scale. Into Berry’s rule of neighborliness and love of precious things, we have love of place and the comfort of home. These are small, background things and too easily lost. The alternatives to neighborliness are either social isolation or tribalism.

On July 17, a group of experts are held a conference on a Chicago-Milwaukee global megacity at Milwaukee’s Marquette University. They discussed how the mega-regions are the economic game players in a global economy dominated by singular economic “city states.”

The conference centered on a 332 page report generated by the Paris based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It warned that without closer economic/political ties within the Chicago megacity region its status as a global economic center will wither. In their report, the “visiting experts” from Paris concluded that without closer ties the region “is at a tipping point.”

In a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial, Richard C. Longworth, a conference presenter and a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs reiterated the OECD report’s central premise: “In short, big cities are the future. Even Chicago, which already is big, needs to get bigger to compete with other global cities.” 

He went on to say:

“First, let's agree with the OECD [the “visiting experts” from Paris] that anything left to state governments won't happen. The two cities have more in common with each other than either has with Madison or Springfield . . .

. . . Milwaukee and Chicago eventually need to loosen controls that state governments hold over urban zoning, taxation, education, transport and other vital functions.”

So what’s up with that? Is the Chicagoland Chamber courting Milwaukee with a proposal to begin laying the foundation for what could become an entirely new and radical political entity – a City State?

Longworth’s pitch to Milwaukee is that the keys to prosperity are global and huge. Yet, a city’s greatness isn’t defined by either its size or its global economic status. 

  

First, we’re all global now, many of us more so than we would rather be.

Taylorville, in central Illinois, is as firmly entrenched in the global economy as Chicago is. The farmers in the surrounding countryside grow corn and soy beans, and buy their household goods at Walmart.  Like Taylorville, to whatever degree Chicago is an economic center, it is inescapably a global economic center.

To whatever degree Milwaukee is tied to Chicago’s position as global economic center, it will be so regardless of any mega city mindset.

Size isn’t a defining factor in a city’s greatness either. There are a multitude of cities, large and small, that are great cities. Vienna isn’t a huge global mega-city. It is a large city. With a metropolitan population of around 2.5 million, it is larger than Milwaukee at 1.75 but much smaller than the Boston metropolitan area with 4,500,000 residents. Vienna is consistently ranked among the most livable cities in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It was tied for first in 2005 and ranked third in 2011.

On much a smaller scale, tiny Elkader, IA, is delightful. It has a population of less than 1,500 and takes great pride in its newly renovated opera house, its river walk and its charming main street. (link) Neither of these places is overly concerned with becoming or a need to compete with global economic centers.

Aside from that about all the two cities have in common is bratwurst. The Elkader grocery store carries them. In Vienna they are the social food of summer season. According to the Austrian Food web page, “the bratwurst (plural: Bratwürstel) is the most important dish on those popular tent parties and town and city celebrations during the summertime in Austria.” (link)

Global is overated. Livable is overlooked but shouldn't be. It's far more important.

It’s not likely the Economist analysts measure the “beer and brat factor” in determining the livability of a place. They should. It would save them a lot of time. Most of the criteria used in their matrix are objective and to be measured. The more subjective “beer and brat factor,” however, is enough. Bratwurst, tent parties and city celebrations are all you need to know. The more often these things are going on, the more livable a place is. It’s simple. These reflect gemutlichkeit, cheerful social goodwill, and the “ancient rule of neighborliness.”

It’s why bratwurst must be cooked carefully. The bratwurst is a delicate sausage specifically meant to nourish gemütlichkeit. It is a food that invites neighborliness. Here is how to cook them.

Waiting to be bathed in beer

The important thing is to not let the casing rupture and subsequently spill out all of the sausage’s wonderful goodness. Some sausage maker’s make precooked brats. These only need to be very gently browned on a grill or in a frying pan prior to serving. They are very good, and are by no means an illegitimate offspring in the large family of bratwurst.

The following discussion is on the careful cooking of a fresh brat. Nevertheless, understanding the spice mix is important whether the brat is raw or precooked. The brat itself is mildly spiced sausage of made of ground veal, pork or a combination of the two. The most predominate spices ground into the mix are marjoram and nutmeg. In addition, sausage maker’s all have their signature spice blends, that may include almost anything, and some will add beer, others apples or cheddar cheese to the mix.

Beyond that, it’s an eclectic sausage that can happily embrace many things. Traditionally it served on a good roll with onions, sour kraut, and a Dusseldorf style mustard. Alternatively, however, topping it with Jalapeno peppers and grated cheddar cheese is not sinful. Ketchup is, but we are all fallen creatures, so if you are so inclined do so with a guilty smile.

It’s certainly a sausage that would happily snuggle up with stack of potato pancakes to be warmly covered in blanket of homemade applesauce. And should that intimate plate be garnished with a generous sprinkling of grated cheddar cheese, this humble “bar” food raises to the lofty heights reserved for “haute cussine.”

There are two schools of thought in Wisconsin when come to cooking the brat. Some purists claim the only way is to slowly and gently cook bratwurst on a grill until fully cooked and nicely browned. Others believe the sausage should be precooked in beer before finishing on the grill. The grill only adherents hold precooking washes out the sausage’s delicate flavors. The precook disciples warn the grill only method invites an unacceptable risk disaster – a brat disfiguringly charred on the outside and raw in the middle.

Each side’s argument has merit, but misses the bigger point. The only way to cook a bratwurst is carefully. With that in mind, by all means put the raw brats on the grill but be willing to have the dedication to carefully lord over them for twenty minutes or so. Do not become distracted.

The same is true if they are to be precooked. They mustn’t be overcooked. After all, even a hardboiled egg can take on certain hard rubber, handball like qualities if overcooked.       

Brats for Four:

1 pound package of fresh brats (4 or 5)

1 baseball sized onion sliced

1 – 2 cans of beer

1 teaspoon of marjoram

1 teaspoon of nutmeg

2 cups of sour kraut drained

In combine brats, spices, onion and kraut in pot and cover with beer. Bring the beer to a steaming simmer just below the boiling point. Simmer the brats for twenty minutes. Boiling the brats will increase the tendency of the fat in the sausage to well up in blisters under the casing. If blisters form, lance them with a toothpick and return the juices to the beer, onion and sour kraut. Meanwhile prepare a fire on the grill.

Once the brats are pre-cooked, brown them gently over indirect heat. Turn frequently to avoid burning the casing or allowing it to split. When browned serve these beauties on a good bun, covered in sour kraut and onion with a narrow ribbon of mustard.
And don't forget a cold beer.