How Andreas Bogk Brought Real Berliner Weisse Back From the Dead
Getting to Know Andreas
After seeing the crowdfunding appeal, I tried to contact Andreas the next time I was passing through Berlin, though I got no response to my messages. A few months later, however, Andreas actually answers an email, and after a few more ignored messages—resulting in one planned trip that was canceled at the last minute—he finally agrees to meet me at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday in late August.
It’s an easy, two-train S-Bahn jaunt from Berlin’s main train station to the former East Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain, which appears remarkably better off from the way I remember it 15 years ago: plenty of cafés and cool but casual restaurants, and lots of young slackers lounging in a beautiful, shady park. It seems like there is at least a touch of the old East Berlin remaining, however, with several decrepit old buildings and a few remnants of funky Communist-style lettering on old signs, like the lost typography of an extinct civilization.
The address where we’re supposed to meet turns out to be a large Art Nouveau apartment building near the park, though no one answers when I ring the buzzer that says Bogk Bier. The building’s front door is open, however, so I take a seat on a bench in the courtyard and start to wait. A half an hour later, a skinny guy with spectacles and a ponytail pulls up on a bicycle, wearing a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt that says “PH NEUTRAL.” After introducing himself, Andreas steps inside to put away his things, then comes back out to join me on the bench with a bottle and a couple of glasses. As he opens the bottle, I ask him what really happened with his German Kickstarter clone.
“The success in crowdfunding depends in part upon the story that you tell,” he says, choosing his words carefully and sniffing cautiously at the bottle once he gets the cap off. “I think the idea of a beer that used to be very common and is now on the brink of becoming extinct—but we can still save it—got people’s attention.”
That might be true, but there’s another thing that he doesn’t mention: In the world of internet security, Andreas is a complete badass, a rock star among computer and mobile security pros. His LinkedIn job description actually identifies him as a “Senior Hacker,” and his resume on another career website notes that he spent four years as the Geschäftsführer—or “managing director”—of Germany’s notorious Chaos Computer Club, a group whose members once hacked their way into acquiring the fingerprints of Wolfgang Schäuble, their country’s minister of the interior, which they then released to the public as a warning about the shortfalls of biometric security systems. When they did, Andreas was interviewed by Spiegel, the German equivalent of Time magazine, among many other venues.
So as he puts it, maybe it was the story he told that got people’s attention for his crowdfunding project. Perhaps a lot of people really do want to rescue an obscure, historic beer style. Or maybe it’s that Andreas is well-known in the German tech community, and in Germany itself. In any case, the end result was that his funding appeal did not end up bringing in 3,000 euros as he had hoped. Instead, the Berliner Weisse project was overfunded by more than 600 percent, and his backers ended up sending him 21,455 euros—almost $29,000—just to set up a tiny, nine-and-a-half-gallon brewery.
This is not quite as nice as it sounds. With a batch size of 36 liters, every time Andreas brews he ends up with maybe a hundred 330-milliliter bottles. That means that even a full year after the crowdfunding project finished, Andreas is still brewing beer for his backers, and his beer still hasn’t been released to the general public. “I ended up owing people 2,000 bottles,” he says.
Careful and Relaxed
When he’s discussing beer, Andreas comes off as professorial and precise, talking about brewing techniques like they were the cold processes taking place deep inside a computer network. But there’s a looser and more personal side as well. Andreas is, after all, a guy who grew up in the former German Democratic Republic, an original East Berliner who talks fondly about his neighborhood—or kiez in the local dialect—of Köpenick, and when he’s discussing his hometown, you can tell that he feels it. There’s something personal about his quest to revive Berliner Weisse, and a lot of his answers seem to be about himself as much as anything else. His brewery resembles a glorified homebrew setup—lots of folks can brew 36-liter batches in their kitchens—and when I ask him if everything in his ramshackle cellar is fully legit as a commercial brewery with the local authorities, he just shrugs.
“Berlin is different than the rest of Germany,” he says. “Even the bureaucrats are more relaxed in Berlin.”
He’s fairly relaxed himself, and not just in terms of punctuality. Although the ancient sediment he cultured out of the bottle resulted in living cells—the ones in the very beer he’s pouring—Andreas hasn’t bothered to have them checked. The Brettanomyces is there, but he has a suspicion there might be other microorganisms as well, and he doesn’t really care either way. For his Saccharomyces, he’s using Safale S-04, a simple dried yeast that is popular with homebrewers. But for souring, he took pains to track down a specific species of bacteria, Lactobacillus brevis, from the Leibniz Institute German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, choosing one particular strain of L. brevis out of six the institute had available. (The most common species of Lactobacillus used for Berliner Weisse by American breweries, L. delbrueckii, “kind of works” for the beer, he says, but brevis is the correct one.)
This alternating mix of detail-obsessed and “whatever” comes up repeatedly with Andreas. For mashing, he decided to forgo Berliner Weisse’s traditional decoction mash, instead using a single-temperature infusion mash, just like a typical homebrewer.
“I experimented with different methods, but the taste was the same, so I went with the single step,” he says. “I like simple ways of doing things.”
At the same time, he’s careful to exchange exactly 10 percent from each new batch of beer with the same volume from an older batch. This lowers the pH for the new batches, he explains, making them more acidic, which creates a nice, comfortable home for his Lactobacillus brevis while also keeping any unwanted microorganisms in check. For the old batches, this addition of new beer is used as fresh sugar for carbonation.
In terms of fermentation temperature, he’s relaxed again—at least for the Berliner Weisse. He originally started out as a homebrewer, and even after getting his Berliner Weisse off the ground, he still bangs out imperial stouts and other craft styles. For those other beers, he’s happy to use exact temperature controls. For the Berliner Weisse, his yeast and bacteria get whatever temperature happens to be in the cellar.
“It’s about 15 Celsius [59 Fahrenheit] in the winter, and about 20 Celsius [68 Fahrenheit] in the summer,” he says. “In the summer the beer gets sour faster. I’m OK with that. I don’t care if any two batches of my beer are the same.”
Tasting a few batches, you can tell that they’re definitely not. The earlier brews are usually more sharp, the newer batches are often more gentle, though there’s a noticeable similarity from bottle to bottle. There’s a stronger experiment, a so-called “Märzen-Weisse,” that Andreas brewed to have about 6% alcohol, which shows the stronger sourness of acetic acid. But his regular Berliner Weisse doesn’t have that at all: Instead, the lactic flavors of the beer are round and gentle, as sweetly sharp as a lemon meringue pie.
It takes at least three months of conditioning before the beer starts to taste any good, Andreas says. In order to make a beer more like the way it was a long time ago, he decided not to use fresh yeast and bacteria each time. Instead, he reuses slurry from batch to batch, hoping that the mix of Saccharomyces, Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus will become a stable culture, just like the original mixed cultures that brewers in Berlin used for centuries.
“They never used a single-cell yeast,” he says. “They never used a clean culture. They just repitched.”
Even after 20 batches, the approach seems to be working: The beer is astonishingly drinkable, with a beautiful aroma of pineapple and other tropical fruits. But just behind that is a scent that reminds you of something wild, like some kind of nocturnal animal that you never really see, and which smells just dangerous enough to keep you from wanting to get too close.
It’s the Brettanomyces, I imagine, and whatever else Andreas cultured out of the ancient bottle from the country that doesn’t exist anymore, inside that Class 2 laboratory whose location will never be made public. When I ask him, Andreas says that he doesn’t know the correct species name for his strain—it’s definitely not bruxellensis, though he’s not exactly sure which type of Brettanomyces it might be. But whatever it is, he’s sure that it’s alive.
This story appears in the July issue of All About Beer Magazine. Click here for a free trial of our next issue.
Evan Rail
Evan Rail is the author of three Kindle Singles: Why We Fly: The Meaning of Travel in a Hyperconnected Age, In Praise of Hangovers and Why Beer Matters, a Kindle Singles bestseller. His writing on food and travel appears regularly in the New York Times. He lives in Prague.