On a recent trip to Berlin, immediately after checking in to the hotel my first thought was to find somewhere selling the beer that Berlin gave its name to. However, closing time was approaching so instead of getting on the U-Bahn I entered a likely looking pub in my neighborhood and asked for a glass of Berliner Weisse. No luck, the bartender couldn’t even offer me a bottle of Kindl’s Berliner Weisse, the best-known (and rather indifferent) example.
Instead I had a glass of an unfiltered Zwickel from Bavaria. It was nice but it didn’t represent Berlin in the same way Kölsch soothes the soul in Cologne, Alt demands to be drunk in Dusseldorf, and Rauchbier strokes its way into the senses in Bamberg.
Finally finding Berliner Weisse in Berlin
Next day I finally found what I was looking for, a Berliner Weisse from Brauerei Lemke at its own restaurant and bar, which also has a compact brewing kit producing beers for onsite consumption. Post-industrial in its fittings (stainless steel ducts, plenty of wood) and with a semi-rural vibe outside, including a tractor, this is a short stroll from Alexanderplatz (and incidentally not far from its main brewery) and in this very contemporary space I enjoyed a taste of old Berlin.
The beer was clean and tart, dry and refreshing, with a hint of a cider-like tang on the nose. Pale gold in color and 3.5% ABV, it was a sublime taste experience and it felt like drinking a part of Berlin’s tumultuous history.
However, given its shyness in the city, which contrasts with the fact that dozens of breweries produced it in the 19th century, many beer travelers will wonder what happened to this snow leopard of a beer style.
On my visits to the German capital, it was always Kindl’s 3% ABV version, light in its acidity and rather clean, that cornered the market, all too often offered with the addition of sweet fruit syrups. From personal observation during several visits to Berlin in the past decade, this seems to be a beer offered in the more tourist-focused restaurants, something those wanting to try a local beer had with their pizza and then went onto a Pils or a Helles, like the locals drank.
Why the style is not more popular
It was reminiscent of a travel assignment to Leipzig when I excitedly told a hotel receptionist that I wanted to try Gose. His reaction was a quizzical smile and the word ‘Why?’
“Why” is a good word to describe the predicament of Berliner Weisse. Why is it such a minority style in its home city, especially as independent brewers around the world, including the United Kingdom, United States, Italy and even Taiwan, have made one?
For Oli Lemke, who started the eponymous brewery in 1999, it is almost obligatory for a Berlin brewer to produce a Berliner Weisse. There are more than 100 breweries in the city but it seems like Lemke is only one of three producing the style. The other two are Schneeeule and Berliner Berg, who according to their website have brought in a ‘newly brewed’ version of the style.
“We began producing our version in 2016,” Lemke says, “after approximately two years of research and development. It is a light and refreshing beer, but also very complex in taste. It is the most traditional beverage in Berlin but was almost extinct. Yet, it belongs to Berlin and is the culinary landmark of the city. It is really unique. We don’t add syrups as it would somehow destroy the beer. We’d rather add real fruits, like cherries, or herbs, such as woodruff, during the fermentation process for different variations of our Berliner Weisse.”
The city’s beer, looking for growth
Ulrike Genz is the only other producer of the style in Berlin, though unlike Lemke she solely focuses on Berliner Weisse (incidentally the style has to be brewed within the city limits to be called a Berliner Weisse, in the same way as this applies to Kölsch). Her small brewery is called Schneeeule, meaning snowy owl, and she runs her own bar in Berlin’s Wedding district. She admits to being fascinated by the style, partly because of its low alcohol and complexity.
Having studied brewery technology and taken placements at the Franconian brewery Göller and the noted producer of Schwarzbier, Köstritzer, she says that the emergence of craft beer interested her. However, there was a caveat. At many of the craft brewers’ gatherings she went to, she felt that many of the beers were too strong.
Then enlightenment dawned.
“One day, a brewer brought a Berliner Weisse to one of these evenings,” she says, “and for the first time I drank a real one and was surprised. I’d had Kindl’s version before, which was the only one made, but they missed the Brettanomyces, which was the real character of the style. Kindl was served with red or green syrup and when you want a beer and you get it with syrup it can be a bit confusing and you try it once and never again. It is a bit of a ‘I don’t like beer’ beer. When I drank my first real Berliner Weisse it was ‘wow’. You could drink it the whole day while you talk with friends.”
Marlene is a 3.5% ABV version of the style, served in its traditional stemmed, chalice-like, wide-lipped glass, usually dispensed with a slow pour allowing the bubbles to rise to the top of the glass as if wanting to escape. There was the earthiness of Brett on the nose, an elemental aroma that grounded the beer. In the background I could also pick up a hint of cider engaged in the long sleep of fermentation in a farmyard barn. On the palate, it sparkled and danced and pirouetted with the grace of a ballet dancer, which worked well with a prickly tartness, a light fruitiness and a dry finish. There are other versions of this core beer, including Kennedy (this includes US-grown Sorachi Ace) and Dietrich, which is Marlene aged for a year.
Brewing a traditional Berliner Weisse
Genz is very much an advocate of adding Brettanomyces to her beers, as is Lemke, who produces the wort in the same brewhouse as his other beers, but ferments in a different facility. She notes that when she began brewing, it was impossible to get hold of Brettanomyces or lactobacillus, but had an inkling she might be able to isolate them from old bottles, where they were still alive.
Fortunately, in 2013, she came upon some bottles from a brewery that had closed in 1990 and found it possible to isolate Brettanomyces from them. For her, the use of the wild yeast gives the real sense of identity to Berliner Weisse, what she says is the “right carbonation and the special taste, you cannot get this animal-like taste and smell from normal yeast.”
Since then she has learned to grow a wet culture of Brettanomyces, while the lactobacillus comes from grains of malted barley. After each brew she keeps the cultures for the next batch.
“It is impossible for my Berliner Weisse to be the same from batch to batch,” she says. “It has to be drinkable and well-balanced, but I have no temperature control, though I don’t think that is necessary. I have to work within my own environment with the cultures I have with different influences on them. It is also more interesting to work like this.”
She adds that after being on the TV talking about her beer, she received a phone call from an elderly woman who said it was fantastic that she could age Berliner Weisse again, as her family did it for years in the past.
“She said her father and grandfather did it and as kids she recalled they had to be very quiet as they drank it. Her uncle put it in the cellar when his son was born and they drank it when he was 21. She said it was like champagne, and much better.”
The two examples of Berliner Weisse I tried were excellent but the scarcity of the style being brewed in its home city still left me asking if this was a style slowly coming to a natural end. That returned to the word “why” and I spoke with Berlin-based beer historian and author Andreas Krennmair for enlightenment.
“In the last few years Bavarian Helles has become more popular which has somewhat broken the absolute dominance of Pils around here,” he says, “while craft beer and its typical styles is only about 1 percent of the total German beer market, and mixed-fermentation sour beers are a tiny share of that. With the conservatism of German beer drinkers, I don’t expect any massive shifts in the next few years.”
Berliner Weisse and future growth
On the other hand, Lemke is much more positive about the future of Berliner Weisse and that his and Genz’s examples will inspire others to take up the torch of this shy beer style. Though you could argue that Krennmair’s gloomy prognosis above is probably more realistic about the future of Berliner Weisse. However, given that Brauerei Lemke opened in 1999 and in its early years was introducing such styles as Belgian Dubbel and Porter to what was an even more conservative German drinking public then, maybe he has a point.
“Most consumers in Germany have fairly fixed ideas of what a beer should taste like and are not very open to new ideas in this area,” he says, “especially since Berliner Weisse’s sourness and Brettanomyces flavor make it very different from the mainstream. It will take a long time to reclaim its place, but we are sure it will one day.’
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