The closest analogue to British tea culture in nineteenth-century Germany was what was called Kaffeeklatsch (coffee gossip). This usually referred to informal gatherings in the mid-afternoon. Tea could also be served, but coffee tended to be the preferred beverage of choice. Kaffeeklatsch was heavily gendered and mostly involved elite women and their own social networks of other women. As the gossip component of the compound word implies, not all nineteenth-century commentators found women's coffee parties very edifying, and when Kaffeeklatsch filtered down to the middle-classes and Jews (!), some cultural critics portrayed it as one element of bourgeois superficiality.

For German men in this period, coffee drinking and other forms of beverage sociability did not typically take place at home, but in various cafes and tavern houses. These establishments often catered to particular estates or certain groups of people. Women could and did go to cafes as well, but this was the exception rather than the rule. The German coffeehouse was very much a masculine space in terms of the clientele. Of course, the coffeehouse likewise saw an invasion of the middle classes. Stefan Zweig would famously say that the "Viennese coffeehouse was a sort of democratic club to which one brought admittance for the price of a cup of coffee." Zweig was correct, but with the proviso that buying a cup was often out of the reach of day-laborers and other types.

Another avenue of elite sociability was to "take the waters," or Kur, in one of Germany or Austria's thermal spas or resorts such as Baden-Baden, Bad Ems, or Karlsbad. These resort towns were already attracting the German elites in the early nineteenth century and their appeal grew over time. Most biographies of leading political figures of the period such as Bismarck invariably mention their subjects' Kurs. Again, in a familiar pattern, the spas' clientele grew more diverse, especially during the boom period of the Gründerzeit, with more middle-class visitors.

For more reading on consumpton, leisure, and sociability in this time, there are no shortages of monographs (eg Health and Hazard: Spa Culture and the Social History of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century) or surveys (eg Blackbourn's The Long Nineteenth Century), but the novelists of the period and early twentieth century also provide a good window into this vanished social world. As Gordon A. Craig related in his introduction to his study of Fontaine:

I sat down to read Freytag’s Soll und Haben, Spielhagen’s Sturmflut, and Raabe’s Pfisters Muhle with enthusiasm and profit. Indeed, I learned more from them about early industrial development in Germany and the social consequences of the new capitalism and the financial collapse of 1873 than I had from any historical account that had yet come my way.

In addition to Zweig, Theodor Fontaine often drew on the mores of the Junker aristocracy for his barbs while the realist novels of Gustav Freytag imbibed much of this milieu's social prejudices. Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse wrote about the parvenu aspects of bourgeois Germany as they looked back on the Kaiserreich from the vantage point of Weimar. While novels and other works of fiction and poetry do not supplant secondary sources, they are very useful to gain an insight into the mentalities of the era.