10 years since I jumped from casually seeking out better bars on my travels to actively hunting them for the purposes of guiding you, I’ve visited Europe’s smallest and largest drinking holes, from the world famous to bars even the city’s own residents aren’t aware of.

Their core purpose is the same: hosting somewhere you can socialise with a drink. The experiences, though? Quite different.

In this article we compare the sights, sounds and sensations in big cavernous venues with the experience at compact little bars.

Beer Halls

Something about the best beer halls provide a collegiate atmosphere, akin to belonging to a fraternity, guild or a sports club. Yes, possibly elements of a boarding school refectory too. A strange sense of nostalgia is suffused during your visit to a beer hall, because other than residents of cities such as Cologne or Munich, these are not spaces of a kind adults routinely visit. The mind, always striving for reference points does inevitably drag you back to the last time you were in a hall to eat and drink: school days.

While a beer hall is vast, the sheer quantity of people provides a shared, communal experience that shrinks the space. Interiors are palatial, ceilings sometimes high-vaulted like a church. The scale and spectacle is designed to make you feel like one small element in a tapestry. Some go further in their efforts – not only the oversized beer mugs, which we all know from Bavarian stereotypes (though the beer halls of Nord Rhein-Westphalia with their small Stange glasses will be huffing and puffing at being yet again overshadowed) but in the case of Hofbräuhaus, novelty giant Pretzels that seem to have emerged from a savoury version of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Not all beer halls have their indulgent sense of whimsy, but nonetheless feel like a clear departure from the ordinary.

You may be thinking ‘why would I go somewhere to feel small?’ Well, the nature of socialising in a beer hall completes that which could otherwise be isolating and unsatisfying. You’re tempted, urged and compelled by the atmosphere and surroundings to feel part of a satisfying whole. You share large tables and benches with strangers, often making conversation and enjoying the transience. Yours and your acquaintance’s lives overlap for an hour or so before decoupling as you – or they – depart and the experience drifts into the ether. Among a group of friends the experience in a busy beer hall can be the epitome of convivial without feeling insular or cliquey.

Across the room you can spy groups across rows of tables, their subtly different moods and whims – a hall is big enough to absorb swells of laughter and gregariousness without becoming overbearing. Even if that isn’t the case, then there are beer halls such as Augustiner Bräu Mülln in Salzburg that are so big you can simply move to one of their other enormous rooms to escape irritants. There is a shared experience even among people who you will never meet and possibly never even make eye contact with, as their afternoon or evening runs parallel to yours, the echoes and murmurs collected in these secular cathedrals to beer and socialising.

A good beer hall contains layers of patronage – a first time visitor can be rapt by its awesome size and atmosphere, delighted by the novelty of a 1l Maß and indulged, waited hand and foot by ever willing servers (if they’re lucky). A more frequent visitor can enjoy breaking through to first name terms with some of the staff and regulars, a nod and a wink here and there breaking the ice. A regular patron is often endowed with their own shelf space storing their personal Maßkrug – few signs show you’ve ‘made it’ at a German pub more than this. If you haven’t seen these, they range from practical in design to the ornamental kind you’ll have seen in souvenir shops and the display cabinets of provincial museums. The above mentioned Munich beer hall boasts shelf space for 616 and can seat a capacity of 3500. I have been present where the building was more or less at capacity and you could sense the pistons pumping at full speed! You could also sense an operation reaching its zenith, optimally performing the function it was designed for.

Further examples:

Augustiner Stammhaus, Munich

Früh am Dom , Cologne

Radniční sklípek, Liberec

Spiż, Wrocław

Caru’ cu Bere, Bucharest

Pivnice HS, Sarajevo

For many more, jump straight to our Beer Halls section.

Tiny Venues

The flip side to mass socialising.

Large drinking venues are almost always beer halls/brewery taprooms, grand cafés or beer gardens. By contrast, tiny venues are diverse.

These can be microscopic concept bars like the cocktail vendor Backdoor 43 in Milan, one-man shows like mini wine bar Le Volcan in Toulouse, old-fashioned Knajpa type pubs like U Jelinku in Prague (where, ignoring its backroom, most drink na stojáka, on the stand among regulars), drop-in kiosks for shots like A Ginjinha in Lisbon, busy tapas bars like Bodega Carol in Barcelona, singing pubs like In De Karkol in Maastricht or Circus Tavern in Manchester, British micro-pubs like Hop & Vine in Hull, and historical quirks like The Blue Bell in York.

In spite of their diversity – is there a common thread?

I believe so. Small venues can be intimidating – for every agoraphobe there is a claustrophobe – but it’s not just that. The confines of a small bar can feel loaded with obligation, namely to muck in and socialise with staff and strangers.

The dimensions of a small bar bring fixtures and fittings and its clientele into focus – literally. The human eye applies focus up to a distance of six metres. When scanning a larger room your eyes are relaxed. Conversely, everything inside a tiny pub is in focus. Even from this sense alone the experience feels more immediate. As other customers and staff are closer to you, you can sense everything about them more keenly. Their body language, their odour (good or bad), their general attitude is on display, as is yours. This is provocative, or inspiring if you wish to use more positive language. You feel inclined, perhaps even obliged to participate beyond simply ‘being there’.

That feeling is going to produce different responses from different personalities. An extrovert will be in their element. As orders fly back-and-forth across the counter in a tapas bar, the energy in the room lifts conversation, adding vibrancy but a sense of importance. The ritual in the location, the intimacy of the space, often feeling partitioned from the rest of the world all gathers a sense that there’s a specific cool thing happening right here and now, and you’re in amongst it.

An introvert may need some persuading to cross the threshold of these spaces. Fear of being singled out, fear of getting the ritual or the order wrong in some way you can’t perceive but locals can spot a mile off, a language barrier, a lack of personal space. Yet, in the end people are frequently glad they did, like eyeing up an intimidating rollercoaster or theme park ride, then filled with the adrenalin rush and sense of release after taking the plunge. Many I’ve met who I wouldn’t describe as the life and soul of the party ordinarily tell me their favourites have been such places. Perhaps they will never choose them as their locals, but for memorable occasional one-offs where briefly they have stepped outside themselves and their imposed limits.

Tiny venues must by their nature eschew certain formalities. Dining, seating for all, table service, sometimes payment at the end. My view remains that pubs and bars generally improve the more formalities are thrown out of the window, with only a few exceptions where they can genuinely add to a sense of ceremony and fun.

For further examples go to our Tiny Venues section.

After all this, we’ve seen how larger venues use a sense of communality, novelty and ritual to bind customers that could otherwise feel unmoored and anonymous within a shared experience. Noise can bubble over into irritation though and service can at times go missing. By contrast, in a tiny venue everything is direct, there are no hiding places until you face the format square on. If it is a success, keep on plugging away, over time turning the bar into your own little hiding place, with your own gang, as the regulars did before you. The cycle goes on.

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