Germany

German beer drinkers: Here come Americans to the rescue

Who will decided what the next generation of German beer drinkers likes?Why would a German beer drinker pay the equivalent of $4.20 for a 12-ounce bottle of Brooklyn Lager? It’s an excellent beer, but that’s quite a markup over what it costs in the United States and considerably more than Germans pay from any of several outstanding beers.

I don’t have an answer.

Maybe it is somehow related to the fact Berlin Is a Haven of Hip. Consider this from a Washington Post story that got a lot of attention last week: “At a recent tasting in one Berlin bar, guests sipped craft beers out of special vessels shaped like wineglasses that helped concentrate the aromas of the brew. The bar was furnished in a decidedly Berlin style — it was a subterranean lair where beakers of bubbling fluorescent liquids served as decoration, the tables appeared to be made from welded-together car parts, and fake stalactites hung from the ceiling.”

Not quite like drinking beer in Franconia.

That’s not actually what struck me first when I read the story, and compressed a bunch of words into something almost meaningless on Twitter. It was the simple arrogance of this.

“The German beer industry has to reinvent itself in a hurry, or it’s going to be a small fraction of what it is now,” said Eric Ottaway, the general manager of Brooklyn Brewery, which has been expanding in Europe and has been exporting its beer to Germany through Braufactum, which sells a 12-ounce bottle of Brooklyn Lager in upscale grocery stores for the equivalent of $4.20 — almost three times its typical American price.

And this.

“This was simply to fill a void,” he said. “We feel as if we’re teaching a lot of Germans things about their own beer culture that they’ve forgotten.”

He is Matt Walthall, one of three American expats who have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to open a brewery.

German drinkers sure are lucky those guys showed up.

OK, that was snide. Steam blown off. A lot of good in that story, and to be fair, Ottaway has a point. Reinvent itself is a bit strong, but German brewers need to make changes. Oh, wait, some are. Those particular ones just aren’t in this story. So a few links to fill in the gaps:

– Sylvia Kopp’s excellent story from five years ago in All About Beer magazine: Ruled by the Reinheitsgebot?

– The (Real) Beer Nut’s up-to-date report from Munich called The shape of things to come.

– An article in the 2012/2013 edition of Hopfen (a pdf) about the Bier-Quer-Denker workshops gives you a good idea of who well attended they’ve become.

Drinking in place – German delights

Today’s New York Times features a must-read story on the front of the travel section headlined On a German Beer Trail, One More for the Road. Evan Rail (who recently also wrote about Czech beer innovation) set out with a definite purpose:

I wanted to try those German brews that had maintained a sense of local flavor, beers that were produced in their hometowns and, more or less, nowhere else.

In Cologne, I would drink Kolch, a light and fruity pale ale, one of the few beers protected by an appellation of origin as if it were a wine. In Leipzig, I would seek out Gose, a spiced amber beer that was out of production for two decades and that is just now making a small comeback. And in Bamberg, I would try the elusive rauchbier, a beer made with wood-smoked malt that is said to taste like liquid bacon.

Other beer pilgrims could have just as easily chosen other cities with great brewing histories “Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Munich come to mind,” but my trio seemed to offer the most promise and variety.

He starts in Berlin, where there were once 700 brewers of weisse beer and now the last two major producers have merged. But this isn’t a story about tracking down some ancient beers before they disappear – much as a blues fan might have headed to the Mississippi Delta a few years ago to see Frank Frost or Junior Kimbrough in a real juke joints.

The point of this story – to me, at least – is not history, or even tradition. The point is place.

Rail drinks Kolsch in traditional pubs where the average patron is “73 1/2 years old” and also goes clubbing with a much younger crowd in a packed club playing hip-hop at high volume. Even before getting there he finds another young and diverse crowd, favoring the local beer.

Why beer, in such a slick place? And why Kolsch?

“We’re proud of it,” Mira said. “I’m not necessarily proud of being German, but I am proud of being from Cologne. This is our beer.”

Reading this I couldn’t help thinking about tasting a wonderful Kolsch-style beer brewed in North Scottsale, Arizona. At an upscale brewpub decorated in a cowboy motif, where nobody talked about the fact that the beer was different or local. (And the brewery is long gone.)

We know, historically, that the Kolsch evolved into the style that it is for practical reasons (involving such arcane matters as brewing water).

But something else also happened along the way because it is brewed in Cologne and because it is different when you drink it in Cologne.

That’s why you should read this story.

(And we haven’t even got to the smoked beers of Bamberg or Leipzig’s Gose – tomorrow, perhaps.)