Maß

• 1. Introduction

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  Maß is the German word for the amount of beer in a regulation mug, and in modern times it means exactly one liter. The word travels under more than one spelling. In Switzerland it appears as Mass, in Bavaria as Mass too, while elsewhere that spelling carries a dialectal sound closer to mas. Say it aloud and you reach for the pronunciation written as maes. The same four letters do two jobs at once. They name a quantity of beer, and they stand in as shorthand for the handled vessel that holds it, the Maeskrug. That vessel is everywhere in Bavarian beer gardens and beer halls, and it is a staple of Oktoberfest. So what exactly counts as a liter when a fill line and an inch of foam are involved? Why does one word change its gender depending on what it means? And how did a drinking mug end up measured against the force needed to break a human skull?

• 2. A Word With Two Genders

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  Das Maess, in its neuter form, is simply the German word for measure. That is the abstract sense, the idea of measurement itself. Switch the article and the meaning narrows sharply. Die Maess, the feminine version, is used in southern Germany and Austria to name a one liter glass beer mug or the beer inside it. Spelling shifts with geography rather than grammar. In Germany and Austria both Maess and Mass are permissible, while Switzerland settles on Mass alone. The plural offers no relief to anyone hoping for a clean rule, since it stays Maess. There is a naming boundary worth getting right as well. English speakers often call the vessel a beer mug, but the term beer stein has a stricter test. A stoneware mug is one form of beer stein, and it may only be called a Maeskrug if it can hold a regulation quantity of beer. The fill line that makes that test possible turns out to be a legal matter, not just a courtesy.

• 3. The Contested Liter

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  1.069 liters was once the figure in the southern German areas, the Austro Bavarian measure of a Maess before it settled at a round liter. Other German speaking regions kept their own standards entirely. In Switzerland between 1838 and 1877, and in Baden until 1871, the Maess ran to a full 1.5 liters. The modern Maeskrug sits slightly larger than a liter for a practical reason. A fill line marks the level the beer must reach, and the space above it leaves room for the head to expand. That line is enforced. Selling beer in mugs with a fraudulent or missing calibration mark is prosecuted as fraud. In Munich an Association Against Fraudulent Pouring of Beer, the Verein gegen betruegerisches Einschenken, fights for the customer rights of beer drinkers, and it is mostly active at Oktoberfest. Outside Bavaria the liter mug barely survives. In the more northerly parts of Germany the Maess has mostly fallen out of use except for Bavarian themed events, because beer for immediate drinking there usually comes in smaller pours, from 0.2 to 0.5 liters.

• 4. Mugs As Property

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  Personalized engravings on their lids set some Maeskruege apart from the rows of identical glasses. Mugs are frequently decorated with a print of the logo of the brewery, but the personal touch goes further. Some beer gardens and restaurants rent space to patrons to store their own mugs. For a small monthly fee, the establishment will also wash one's mug. The vessel, in other words, can stop being something handed across a counter and become something a regular owns, keeps, and returns to.

• 5. An Effective Percussion Tool

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  8500 newtons is the force a full empty Maess can deliver in a violent blow, according to physicist Erich Schuller of the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the Ludwig Maximilians Universitaet Muenchen. He called the Maeskrug an effective percussion tool in which each strike is potentially life threatening. The numbers explain why. An empty Maess weighs 1.3 kilograms, and breaking a human's skullcap requires about 4000 newtons. The mug roughly doubles that threshold. Not every blow ends the same way. In some cases the Maeskrug itself yielded rather than the skull, and those mugs presumably had reduced strength from wear. The same weight that makes the vessel dangerous also makes it the basis of a sport.

• 6. The Sport Of Steinholding

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  45 minutes and 2 seconds is the world record for holding a filled 2.4 kilogram Maess at arm's length, the endurance contest known as Maeskrugstemmen. The discipline goes by several names, Masskrugstemmen and steinholding among them. It is believed to have originated in Bavaria, Germany, yet the competitions are now seen worldwide. The reach extends across the Atlantic with formal structure behind it. A governing body has been created in the United States as the U.S. Steinholding Association, turning a beer garden test of stamina into an organized event far from the gardens where it began.