Jumbo..
Thanks for reminding me that I, too, liked German food while I was over there. I'll see if there are any local places that might come close.
Also, since you spent time there, I have been trying to remember the name of a liquor. I did not like Steinhager - tasted like 90 proof pine needles, and I Jagermeister tasted like 90 proof Vicks Formula 44. I did like Escorial and used to get it here, but they changed the bottle and it never tasted the same after that...they claim they did not change anything else but that was a lie.
Now, what I am trying to think of was brown in color like the Jagermeister, but with a taste I much preferred over JM...
Any recollections?
I always thought Jägermeister tasted like Vick's Formula 44 too. You can't tell by the taste that it has 56 herbs and spices. One time I saw a guy in a bar in Germany drinking something green. When I asked what it was he said roctopus, which I later thought must be an American corruption of Ratzeputz, and he gave me a shot. I smelled Absorbine Jr. once and this stuff tasted the same as Absorbine Jr. smelled. It was the same color too. Now I see that Ratzeputz is brown and tastes like ginger, so I don't know what the heck that shot was.
Chartreuse liqueur would be about the same color but by the description I read its taste is much different. Carthusian Monks have made it since 1737 according to the instructions set out in a manuscript given to them by François Annibal d'Estrées in 1605. It has 130 herbs, plants and flowers, and everything under the sun but the kitchen sink.
Wikipedia says widely sold liqueur brands are Riga Black Balsam, Jägermeister, Killepitsch, Kuemmerling, Schierker Feuerstein, Schwartzhog, Wurzelpeter, and Underberg (Germany), Altvater (Austria), Becherovka (Czech Republic), Unicum (Hungary), as well as Bénédictine and Chartreuse (France). In Italy, amaro ("bitter") liqueurs include Cynar and Ramazzotti. Any of those ring a bell? I had Underberg in little paper wrapped bottles a couple of years ago. It's supposed to be good for your digestion.
P.S. Me and my roommate used to go to a little restaurant in Germany where we usually got Jägerschnitzel and french fries. The mushroom gravy on fries is good too. A couple of times the owner, an old guy name Pete, brought out a bottle of Yugoslavian schnapps. The 3 of us had shots and the term firewater is a perfect description. It was clear and it burned going down. It may have been distilled from fruit, like Rakia or Slivovitz, but tasted like 100 proof lighter fluid. Real schnapps is nothing like the syrupy, typically 30-40 proof flavored liqueurs we call schnaps here. It's distilled from whatever they want to make it from and doesn't have flavors added to it. It's more like grain alcohol than our schnaps.