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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.