One of beers best friends:
Typical Bavarian pretzels appear to be the unintended creation of a Munich baker named Anton Nepomuk Pfannenbrenner. Good old Anton Nepomuk was in the employ of the Königliches Kaffehaus (Royal Coffee House), where he used to make sweet pretzels. One fateful winter day, on February 11, 1839, he absent-mindedly mistook a soda-lye solution for the usual sugar syrup and glazed his pretzels with it. Incredibly, the Kaffeehaus customers, who were otherwise used to sweeter stuff, liked the improbable concoction, and thus was born the Bavarian pretzel. The name pretzel, incidentally, appears to be a derivative of the Latin word bracchium (arm), an allusion to the fact that a pretzel looks much like a pair of folded arms...