Hours of Operation
Tues-Wed 3pm-9pm
Thursday 3pm-10pm
Friday-Saturday 1pm-11pm
Sunday 1pm-8pm
The Background
Who says you have to head out to Luckenbach for a real old-school German-Texas beer joint? The Barbarossa Trough is exactly the place Waylon and Willie painted in song. The square-fronted, tin-porched shack is way out in the country, at the intersection of a couple of farm-to-market roads in the cotton fields east of New Braunfels. It has a (mostly) vinyl honky-tonk jukebox that should be hallowed as a state treasure. It’s cooled with ceiling fans and heated with a stove. There’s shuffleboard and a shrine of empty cans to long-gone beers of yore, near where an unobtrusive TV set quietly plays—what else?—Gunsmoke, not quite loudly enough to compete with the codgers at the bar decrying the many perceived shortcomings of the outgoing President Obama. And in that same beer shrine corner, there’s a framed newspaper article describing the place’s old-timey bona fides, dated 1988 and now itself yellowing with age. Why this place has yet to become a tourist trap is a puzzler to me—maybe that’s just how real it is.
