The Unpredictable Journey of Berlin’s Beer Scene
Berlin is like an old unpredictable friend, I’ve learned. Last time I was there, I was downing gin with a drag queen in a dive bar at 3 am, with an inflatable penis rotating overhead. This time around, I found myself sipping Champagne at a brewery owner’s birthday party. If you know just what you’re in for, maybe you’re not doing it right.
The journey from Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport into the city is one I’ve come to love over numerous visits. From the Wes Anderson-esque railway platforms and the dated trains, the U-Bahn goes underground and the S-Bahn supposedly runs at surface level, but bafflingly, they seem to interchange on a whim. The blurred vistas of continental-European apartment blocks always make Berlin feel different from other major European cities. And so it should – it’s a city stacked with and wracked by history, feeling at odds with the rest of Germany, much of Europe, and at times, itself.
The Scars of a Divided Past
Wrenched apart in the division of Germany in the years following World War II, Berlin was hewn roughly down the middle for decades. Today, token pieces of the infamous Berlin Wall still stand – some stretches run for hundreds of meters, while some are just a few feet wide, as solemn as gravestones, though inscribed with graffiti. That trauma still feels near at hand; the city only reunified a little over a generation ago, in 1990, some 45 years after its split.
In the wake of Cold War surveillance, separation, and extreme difficulty, Berlin erupted into unparalleled festivity. Week-long parties in abandoned Nazi bunkers and old power stations, and raves in mind-bending clubs, set the city’s nightlife apart. Though Berlin’s party scene is perhaps a little tamer than during its heyday and a little more tourist-driven, certain hangovers from its decadent, drug-fueled past give it an edge. Some bars rarely close, and others stay open until the wee hours. 24-hour convenience stores known as Spätkaufs or Spätis are as common as luminous orange trash cans.
Exploring Berlin’s Craft Beer Oasis
One of the first things I do upon arrival is head into one of these tiny corner shops and buy a fat bottle of Tegernseer Hell, folding myself around beer crates stacked as high as my head, drinking it while overlooking the Spree, the river that winds through Berlin’s center and east towards Poland. After my partner and I check into our hotel, we head out for a beer, passing sign after sign offering Krombacher, Radeberger, or Berliner Kindl, in favor of BRLO Brwhouse, just a short walk away.
The brewery, housed in an expanse of shipping containers beside a gravel garden, is perched on the edge of a long green park, across which a U-Bahn bridge stretches, punctuating the afternoon with flashes of bright yellow as trains run past. “The park itself used to be a wasteland,” says BRLO co-founder Katharina “Katha” Kurz. “It belonged to the German railway company, and you couldn’t even access it.” Then in 2011, they opened this park. Though it started life as a nomadic brewery, BRLO moved in shortly after the park opened.
Even in the drizzle, the brewery is busy. For reasons no one’s quite explained to us, there’s a jazzily dressed brass band pumping out pop songs in the middle of it all, taking shelter under a broad umbrella. At one point, they stand under the balcony where Katha’s birthday party is underway – where my girlfriend and I are surprised to find ourselves, Champagne in hand – and blast “Happy Birthday” upwards, looking for all the world like a modern-day fanfare.
Navigating the Challenges of Craft Beer in Germany
The site is one of two that BRLO occupies. This shipping-container facility, which it shares with a contemporary vegetarian restaurant, focuses on kegged beer. Its other location in Spandau to the northwest produces bottled beer. “At some point, BRLO will have to up sticks and move beyond its boxy shanty town when the local authorities reclaim the land for development,” Kurz says. “Until then, Kurz hopes that the brewery’s annual output will reach 8500 barrels (10,000 hectoliters) across both sites. I think for German craft, it’s pretty decent. Craft beer is just so small.”
For a country with such long-standing and ingrained beer culture – you’ll literally find bottle caps trodden into the dirt on any given street – German craft beer is small. Back home in the UK, German beer is still often seen as homogenous, as an unrelenting swathe of Pilsner, via a range of varyingly authentic Oktoberfest events. German beer presents the excuse to get publicly shitfaced. “Even within Germany, home to dozens of native beer styles, beer is often simply ‘well, beer,'” Kurz says. “A lot of people go into a bar and say, ‘A beer, please.’ They don’t say, ‘What kind of beer do you have?’ or ‘I want this or that.'”
Despite these factors, which could give the impression that Germans simply don’t care about beer, there’s a belief that theirs is the best. “You have to look at Germany overall when you look at beer,” Timo Thoenissen, founder of Berlin brewery Strassenbräu, tells me. “We always had the perception that we have the best beer in the world. Like, ‘All this foreign crap – who needs that? We are number one, why try harder?'”
Andreas Martin, husband of Schneeeule Brauerei founder Ulrike Genz, agrees. “Germans tend to drive their 60,000 SUV to the discount supermarket, buy a 20-cent sausage to put on their 5,000 grill on the way home from the supermarket, they buy a crate of beer – 10 liters for 8 and 50 cents. That’s Germany. Beer has to be cheap and available, and that’s it. That’s the only thing Germans want from beer.”
Embracing the Eclectic Nature of Berlin’s Beer Scene
As we tear ourselves away from Katha’s unfolding birthday party – with difficulty, as bottles of Cascade and 3 Fonteinen have just been unearthed – and plonk ourselves onto a train with a Wegbier in hand, I’m left wondering if that actually is all Germans want, given how busy BRLO’s beer garden is.
In Friedrichshain, the streets are busy with Sunday morning shuffling. Cafes throng with countless brunch parties, and families stroll through parks while beer gardens begin to fill up. A little of last night’s flotsam and jetsam remains underfoot, empty Lager bottles lining the curb like roadkill on a highway.
At Hops & Barley, one of the first brewpubs in the city, it’s quiet inside, though by the time we’ve parked ourselves by the window, the trestle tables out front are dotted with tall pints. As I work my way through a crisp pint of Pilsner, I see a glimpse of the German drinking culture described by Thoenissen and Martin – no one’s on Untappd or poring over menus, people drink casually while watching football (FC Union Berlin are in the final of the German league, and it’s gripping – even we’re enthralled) or while deep in conversation. It’s great-quality beer, but it’s convenient. It’s not expensive, either.
One might think that a country with beer at its heart would delight in the blossoming of a new, exciting addition to the industry. In fact, it’s that very reliance on tradition that’s hampering the rise of craft beer. “If you have the best beer in the world and it’s cheap, why would you want anything else?” As we visit Berlin’s oldest beer garden, Prater Garten, we find it brimming with people enjoying Pils and Hefeweizen and plentiful pretzels in the sunshine.
Navigating the Craft Beer Movement in Traditional Beer Cultures
“From our perspective, we knew the craft beer movement took off so quickly on the West Coast in Canada and the USA partially because there just hadn’t been a tradition of good beer – however narrow the range of styles,” says Jenia Semenova, co-owner of craft beer venue The Muted Horn. “So when people were finally given the option to drink something tasty and local or fresh, they really responded well. By contrast, Germany has always made some excellent beer. The range of styles is relatively small, mostly centering around Lager, Pilsner, and Helles, but the quality and value is really great. So it becomes more difficult to convince people to try something completely different and more expensive when they are happy with the options they currently have.”
Timo Thoenissen’s theory of regionality having a big impact on the state of German beer holds a lot of water. “If you go down to Franconia and other regions in southern Germany, you have much stronger beer culture, so of course it’s much harder there for any other beer styles to get into that market,” he tells me. “There was no one crying for better beer like in other countries where they’re really drinking garbage. So that’s what took longer overall, and that’s why Berlin is changing faster.”
He does think, however, that Berlin presents the perfect environment for a craft beer industry to develop, due in part to the Radeberger Group, the largest brewery group in Germany, which maintains a local monopoly. “We only have one brewery in Berlin that produces the big Berlin beer – Berliner Kindl, Berliner Pilsner, Berliner Schultheiss – it all comes from one place. So that’s boring, and that’s what people in Berlin don’t really like. So definitely, this is the right place for craft beer.”
The Rise of Berlin’s Craft Beer Movement
Strassenbräu, the brewery Thoenissen set up four years ago, was founded on that disinterest in Berlin’s beer identity. “Having lived in the US and Australia for a while, I returned to Berlin and quickly grew bored with local beer. I thought, ‘Why the heck were in such a modern, creative city, and the beer culture here is garbage?’ There were like two or three breweries back then that were doing something crafty, but even then, it wasn’t on any comparable level to elsewhere.”
Thoenissen had some homebrewing knowledge and soon found an experienced brewmaster, Sebastian Pfister, to help him launch Strassenbräu. Behind the aggressively blue neon sign on its facade, Strassenbräu is tight on real estate – sinks turn into tables, the brew floor doubles as a tasting area, and fermenters are tightly jam-packed into the cold store directly behind the bar. At one point, I literally get stuck between tanks. Production is at capacity, and Thoenissen is also brewing off-site to meet demand, particularly from restaurants.
Strassenbräu’s lineup features markedly international styles such as Pale Ale, IPA (including New England variants), Barley Wine, and Red Ale. A few beers do allude to the brewery’s German heritage, though, with a twist – an orange and pineapple Pilsner and a Haferweizen IPA, a White IPA with oats and wheat in the grist.
Along with BRLO Brewers Tribute, which opened in 2015 to fight against the decreasing variety of tastes and dwindling quality of industrially produced mass beers, and Schneeeule, Strassenbräu is part of a small contingent of native-run craft breweries in Berlin. According to Martin, they’re the only ones not owned and run by American, British, Australian, or Israeli immigrants. “The reason why Berlin has a) the most craft beer breweries in Germany and b) is the only relevant craft beer market in Germany is because of expats,” Martin says.
Reclaiming Berlin’s Beer Heritage
Now the question is, “Are we doing our own thing here – do we develop German craft beers or Berlin craft beers, or are we just copying what’s happening internationally?” Thoenissen says. “We have one style, Berliner Weisse, which Strassenbräu are also brewing now – that’s where I see a lot of potential because that’s our style and that’s our history.”
Though Germany’s craft beer scene is much younger than America’s, there are parallels that can be drawn between the two. Both, for instance, suffered during the 20th century due to the destruction of WWII and Prohibition, respectively. “There was no German beer culture left after the Second World War,” Martin explains. “You have just the Bamberg area where people are still proud of their beer, but the beer culture was basically erased in most parts of Germany by the Second World War. After the war, especially in Berlin, there was nothing left. It was completely destroyed.”
Then they set up new breweries, “but they didn’t set up old Berliner Weisse breweries. A) The knowledge was gone, B) Brewing Pilsner was just faster and cheaper.” Though Berliner Weisse is a key part of the city’s beer heritage, post-war Berlin nearly lost its 500-year-old namesake beer.
“There were just six breweries left – four in the West and two in the East,” Martin says. “They all basically closed until the reunification. After this, the Radeberger Group, a subgroup of Dr. Oetker, were running around Berlin and buying everything. They bought every brewery within like five minutes. They closed down most of them and just kept the most successful – Berliner Kindl, Berliner Pilsner, and Schultheiss.”
Berliner Kindl’s widely available Berliner Weisse often comes pre-mixed with either raspberry or vivid green woodruff syrup. “The problem with most Berliner Weisse is that nobody knows it here, really, except for this touristy drink that’s pre-mixed with syrup like red or green,” says BRLO’s Kurz. “I’ve had fights with people who are like, ‘This is not a Berliner Weisse – it should be red or green.'”
Resurrecting the Traditional Berliner Weisse
My first encounter with traditional Berliner Weisse, a little over three years ago, was pre-mixed with syrup in Bei Schlawinchen, a tiny dive bar that’s supposedly always open and is decorated with all manner of alarming miscellany. On the rare occasion you can find the beer unsweetened, it’s nothing like the Berliner Weisse commonly brewed by contemporary breweries.
For that matter, neither is Schneeeule’s. Genz, from underneath her trademark straw hat, recalls how the master brewer of Berlin’s VLB, a nearby institute that provides research, training, education, and other services for the brewing industry, was one of the few remaining fans of old-school Berliner Weisse. “He poured some he’d brewed in the institute’s basement at a festival, and I fell in love. I drank it the whole night. I looked for Berliner Weisse in Berlin, and there was nothing except for Kindl. Kindl was horrible.”
Genz studied brewing science for 10 years before taking a break to have a child. With her interest in Berliner Weisse firmly piqued, she then spent three or four years, according to Martin, developing the “whole Berliner Weisse thingy” before Schneeeule started trading in 2016. Though much of the knowledge has been lost, through speaking to old brewmasters and hunting down old recipes, Genz and Martin have begun to resurrect Berlin’s beer heritage.
A fitting metaphor for the traditional Berliner Weisse the couple are championing in the face of mass-produced, ahistorical beer is their brewery itself. It’s made up of three small rooms on the edge of an international turbomachinery production plant. Gargantuan fittings and chambers produce deafening clangs that ring out during our conversation. Wort is produced offsite, then Genz ferments, blends, and conditions in this small space. Schneeeule has now reached capacity, and the couple are looking to move – they quickly outgrew this nest and the last before that. Interest and demand in their beer has taken them to London, Russia, and the US recently, and they’ll head back out to America this fall to pour at the Shelton Brothers Festival.
Navigating Arcane Beer Laws in Germany
“The whole Reinheitsgebot is complete bullshit,” loudly proclaims Martin, his spectacles glinting in the bright sunshine. The Vorläufiges Biersteuergesetz 1993 (Provisional Beer Law of 1993), colloquially known as the Reinheitsgebot or German Purity Law, is a major prohib
