Berlin is like an old unpredictable friend. Last time I was here, I drank gin with a drag queen in a dive bar at 3 am while an inflatable penis rotated overhead. This time around, I’ve found myself holding a glass of 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 S-Bahn supposedly runs at surface level, but bafflingly, they seem to interchange on a whim. To the blurred vistas of continental-European apartment blocks, Berlin always feels different to 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.
Craft Beer Takes Root in Berlin’s Eclectic Landscape
As I step out of the train station, the first thing I do is head into one of Berlin’s tiny corner shops, known as Spätkaufs or Spätis, and buy a fat bottle of Tegernseer Hell. Folding myself around beer crates stacked as high as my head, I drink it 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.
Craft Beer’s Uphill Battle in Germany’s Traditional Market
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. “Once we have to move from here and we don’t know how fast we can, we can’t be dependent on this brewery,” Kurz says. Until then, Kurz hopes that the brewery’s annual output will reach 8,500 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, 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.”
“Still a lot of people go into a bar and say, ‘A beer please,'” Kurz says. “They don’t say, ‘What kind of beer do you have?’ or ‘I want this or this.'” 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 very patriotic when it comes to beer.'”
Battling the Bierkultur: Craft Brewers’ Challenges in Germany
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 (a beer for the journey) 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 line 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 Andreas Martin, husband of Schneeeule Brauerei founder Ulrike Genz. 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?” Thoenissen asks. TV Beer, Germany’s answer to macro beer, so named because of the regular ads on national television, is objectively of a high standard, so there’s little for a burgeoning artisanal industry to rail against. Tasteless, unimaginative, and poor-quality beer never dominated the taps of Germany’s bars, pubs, or bierkellers—when 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.
Finding Footing in Berlin: The Craft Beer Scene’s Uphill Battle
“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.”
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.”
Reawakening Berlin’s Brewing Heritage
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, Thoenissen returned to Berlin and quickly grew bored with local beer. ‘I thought, “Why the heck—we’re in such a modern, creative city, and the beer culture here is garbage,”‘ he says. ‘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.'”
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,” he says. “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 sees potential in resurrecting the Berliner Weisse, a key part of the city’s beer heritage that was nearly lost in the post-war years. “After the war, especially in Berlin, there was nothing left,” Martin explains. “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.”
Resurrecting Berlin’s Brewing Legacy
Ulrike Genz, founder and head brewer of Schneeeule (which translates to “Snowy Owl” and is pronounced ‘shnay-oiler’), 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 Genz fell in love. “I drank it the whole night,” she says. “I looked for Berliner Weisse in Berlin, and there was nothing except for Kindl. Kindl was horrible.”
Genz, who studied brewing science for 10 years before taking a break to have a child, then spent three or four years, according to Martin, developing the whole Berliner Weisse thing 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. Their 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. Who said real Berliner Weisse was dead?
Breaking the Reinheitsgebot: The Battle for Brewing Freedom
“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 prohibitive factor in the German beer industry. The most commonly known version of the law was first instated in 1516 in Bavaria, though others predate it, and originally limited brewers to just three ingredients: water, barley, and hops, as the existence of yeast remained undiscovered at the time. Though arguably archaic, an updated version is still in effect across the country today.
“To brew a beer with more than just those base ingredients, a brewer legally has to file for permission—a process that can take almost a year,” adds Kurz. “Obviously, we just want to be as creative as possible, so it’s limiting.” A few breweries, however, completely disregard the law. Some, like BRLO, will overlook it when brewing a one-off beer. Berlin, according to both Kurz and Martin, is significantly more lax in terms of the law’s enforcement than other stricter regions, such as uber-traditional Bavaria. Even within Berlin, it’s wholly dependent on district. In Wedding, where Schneeeule resides, the laws are mostly overlooked. In Marzahn to the east, Martin says, it’s much more strict. “They get fucked every week,” he says of three breweries in the area.
There are other ways around the law, too. “The insane thing about Reinheitsgebot is that when you brew something out of Reinheitsgebot—like, I don’t know, you dry hop it—you’re not allowed to sell it as a beer in Germany,” Martin explains. “Except say, if you brew it in Poland, you can do whatever you like. Then you can import it as beer.” By brewing a little over 40 miles away, over the Polish border, brewers can effectively sidestep an archaic obstacle that many would happily do away with.
“I was talking to the lawyer that is working for the Brauer-Bund, the Brewers Guild of Germany, and the only reason the Reinheitsgebot is still there is because nobody in Germany wants to go up against it in court,” Martin says. “You have to go to the EU court because it’s damaging your own economy—brewers in Germany are not allowed to do what brewers in Poland are. Nobody has the guts to go to the EU court. But we would do it. We would be the killers of the Reinheitsgebot.”
The Craft Beer Scene’s Global Influence
Berlin in the rain is calm. Spring showers chase people
