In Bavaria, the Riegele and Paulaner breweries are fighting over the Spezi brand name. Riegele invented it, Paulaner also uses the name. No matter what comes out of it: Please don’t ruin some of my best childhood memories.
Spezi, this mix of cola and orange soda, is not just any drink. My wife doesn’t like it at all – I love it. Is that generally the case? Is Spezi more of a boys drink? When I was a kid, it was mostly us boys who drank it. But girls weren’t that interesting back then either. So I can’t say for sure if and how much Spezi they drank at the time. All girls, women and people of the opposite sex may forgive me in the following that I can only share my male view of friends.
Anyone who has ever played with an E-Youth team at a football tournament in the scorching summer heat will never forget the first sip of Spezi afterwards – even before the award ceremony. In the breaks between the games, the coach had strictly forbidden us soda or cola. But in the end – even though we had only finished fifth – he gave our small team a round of Spezi. And we could have bolted until after sunset.
Is it the caffeine in the cola or the sugar that turns kids on? Scientists should decide that. All I know is that Spezi made you awake and in a good mood back then. And I’ve had to wait so long for it. Because when I was little, my kindergarten friends and I weren’t allowed to drink coke. And no special either. Because of the caffeine. My parents only allowed me to do that when I started school. Then we suddenly felt like the big ones: Spezi was available in 0.4 or 0.5 liter jars. Almost like dad’s beer.
Incidentally, I grew up in Hesse, where there have always been Spezi with screw caps. And we said “the special”. We were amazed when we found out that in Bavaria they were selling “the” Spezi in beer bottles with crown caps. The boys there could really pop them when they opened them, just like the adults with beer bottles. Cool!
Fun fact on the side: The Riegele brewery in Augsburg has secured the brand name for “the Spezi”, at Paulaner they usually say “the Spezi”, that’s what the Bayerischer Rundfunk found out in 2020. Incidentally, Spezi from Munich is called “Paulaner Spezi” because Riegele says it only issued a sub-license for the Munich company under this condition. Paulaner says there was no talk of a license agreement at the time.
I’ve only known since I’ve lived here that Spezi is particularly important in Bavaria and is even more important there than in the rest of Germany. That’s when I found out that “Spezi” means “good friend” in Bavarian. Kinda fits. But what made me wonder even as a child: Why do so few people in the rest of the world know Spezi?
When I was on holiday at the North Sea or the Mediterranean, the waiters often didn’t know what I wanted when I ordered Spezi. Coke mixed with soda, it only hit half. A waiter in the north once said “cold coffee”. I fell from all clouds.
My mother didn’t really understand the Spezi cult either. She never bought the real Spezi. If it came up, then we were allowed to mix the drink from cola and soda ourselves. But it never tasted like it did on the soccer field. Or at the fire department festivals. Or at the playground with friends. It never tasted like “Spezi”.
Later, the drink rebuilt me in a completely different way. How, you’ve never drunk a cool drink to get a hangover in the morning after a night of drinking? Priceless!
But there are still ignorant people who don’t know anything about these secret powers of the friend – or don’t want to know. Just like the colleague who said this morning: “Here in Hamburg it’s called the Mezzo Mix. Or Schwipp Schwapp.” Heaven! It’s not the same! Has he never drunk Spezi?
I googled it right away – and the result only disturbed me all the more. There are people online who claim that Mezzo Mix tastes better than Spezi anyway. And that’s not just mixed Coca Cola and Fanta – everyone knows that Coca Cola pours its leftovers in there. These guys claim. Mezzo Mix has its own special taste.
That’s rubbish.
Incidentally, Spezi is said to have come into being when, after the Second World War, guests in a Bavarian inn began to mix cola and orange soda. As a result, there was always a large number of opened bottles left over. This is said to have given employees of a brewery the idea of preparing the mixture themselves and filling it in a bottle.
So that’s how the rumor about the leftovers came about. I read that in the coverage of the court hearing between Riegele and Paulaner.
Did I want to know? no I’ll keep thinking back to the days when this drink was very special to us kids.
Then a spec.
Do you also have memories of a special moment with the cult drink Spezi and would you like to share it with us? Then send us a message to mein-bericht@focus.de, preferably with your name and telephone number, so that we can contact you if we have any questions.
We would like to collect and publish some of these anecdotes – maybe even photos. We are excited.
