More stuff to read....

A few interesting reads from around the web. The first's an article from Craft Beer & Brewing, a US site that's mainly aimed at homebrewers. Many of its articles are too US-centric for my taste, but it does also carry some thought-provoking pieces, including this one, Do IBUs matter? Some drinkers – notably hopheads – are obsessed with IBUs, apparently believing the higher a beer's IBU rating, the better it is. This article explains why IBUs tell you something about a beer, but not everything, not by a long chalk!

Like CAMRA's technical committee, which has finally acknowledged that you can have keg-conditioned real ale, I've had more than a few of those cask vs keg discussions where you try to point out that today's kegs are a world apart from the Red Barrels of the 1970s, then someone says “Well, what about the xyz-keg?” and you have to admit that, actually you don't know that one. So it was great to read this long piece on the Ale is Good blog which is basically explaining from a distributor or server's point of view what all the different kegs are. He doesn't really cover the real ale aspects, but hey, there be dragons...

Original 1930s conetop beer cans

And then earlier today, I picked up an item on Jeff Bell's blog where he quotes a tweet from Fuller's John Keeling, expressing the latter's doubts over micro-canning – doubts which Jeff shares. It reminded me that I never really flagged up my own article on the subject of micro-canning, which was published earlier this year in Engineering & Technology, the magazine of the Institution of Engineering & Technology. I was very pleased with the way it came out in print, and the online version's pretty nice too.

This last one was sent in to me, it's an incomer's view of The Best Bars in Neukölln – a hip district of Berlin that is now gentrifying, after decades as a big Turkish & Lebanese area. I mention the article partly because it reminds me how different people have quite different motives for loving bars and pubs. Berlin is home to a bunch of great breweries, several of them in Neukölln including Berliner Berg which is one of the newest, and Privatbrauerei am Rollberg which is inside the old Berliner Kindl brewery building (and which seems to have overcome my initial misgivings to become very well liked). Yet in all his discussion of bars the only beer he mentions is Neumarkter Lammsbräu which is from Oberpfalz in Bavaria!

San Diego invades Europe

American craft brewers are waking up to European opportunities. Oh sure, they've been exporting here for years, but this week has seen not one but two super-hoppy San Diego brewers announce that they will actually brew in Europe.

Stone's site in Berlin

The biggest news was Stone Brewing, well known for the likes of Arrogant Bastard Ale. There's been rumours about Stone opening a European brewery for a few years now, with at least one redundant old English brewery fingered as a possible location, but the reality has turned out quite different: Stone is building a brewery and pub/beer garden in Berlin!

First to the draw however was Green Flash, which is already co-brewing its iconic West Coast IPA in 240-hl batches at St Feuillien in Belgium. It's claimed that this is not just a licence deal, like the one that saw Shepherd Neame brew imitation Sam Adams, but a 'production partnership', whatever that exactly means.

“We’ve been pursuing European distribution of West Coast IPA for some time, however the obvious challenges in delivering fresh IPA to the region have been a huge roadblock,” said GF co-founder Mike Hinkley. “After testing various export scenarios on a small scale, it became apparent that the quality of our IPA when transported to Europe was not ideal and cost-prohibitive for consumers. We were not satisfied with the customer experience and felt we had to come up with a better solution.”

St Feuillien is already noted for its hoppy beers and has done collaboration beers with Green Flash in the past, so the two teams already know each other well. GF's brewmaster Chuck Silva has spent a fair portion of the last year in Belgium, working on getting the flavour profile just right – the one difference between the US and Belgian versions is that the latter will be bottle-conditioned “to protect beer quality in areas of Europe where unrefrigerated conditions may be unavoidable.” I can see this version becoming a hot item with US beer aficionados....

Meanwhile, Stone's plans are considerably more ambitious, and involve an initial investment of $25 million, plus an Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign to raise more. The company is leasing a massive 7000m2 of space in three refurbished buildings that were built in the 1900s as part of a gasworks – they had to be expensively decontaminated as part of the refurbishment process. Due to open in late 2015 or early 2016, the buildings will house a 70-barrel brewery, a shop, an event space and a farm-to-table restaurant – Stone is keen on the slow food movement.

There will also be an 'American-style beer garden', though quite how that differs from a German-style beer garden I don't know, especially when so much about US beer is derived from Germany. Many of the earliest American brewers were German immigrants, from Anheuser and Busch onwards, and while Stone is pretty eclectic, some US breweries still focus on German-derived beer styles rather than British or Belgian, say.

“Once open, we will bring Germany and the rest of Europe a taste of our craft beer vision, and look forward to sharing the unique beers that we have spent the last 18 years brewing,” declared Stone CEO and co-founder Greg Koch (another German surname, of course).

Yet while some of the US media has taken a nationalist 'young upstarts teaching the oldies how to do it' line, ignoring – or more likely, ignorant of – the fact that many German and other European brewers are already aboard the craft beer bandwagon, Koch was more modest.

“We have no attitude that we are coming to save anybody or conquer anybody,” he said in an interview. He acknowledged that there is already a craft beer movement challenging the German brewing giants, and added, “We are coming to add our shoulder, to help push that boulder up the hill.”

So why Berlin and Belgium? I can think of several reasons, an obvious one is they are in the Eurozone, which simplifies your exporting to the rest of the EU. Another is they both have strong beer heritages, which should make it easier to find both staff and customers, and of course they have good English language skills.

The last thing is that, unlike the UK where there is already a strong craft brewing industry (both new-wave and traditional), the beer revolution has only recently kicked off on the mainland. Sure, there's lots of micro and nano brewers, and many of the old brewers are trying to adjust and produce crafty sidelines, but the market is still growing, with plenty of opportunity.

Brewpubs of Berlin, day two

Unlike day one, this was also a family day, which meant finding places which would be reasonably child-friendly. It also meant a bit less drinking and a bit more hanging around playgrounds and the like...

Heidenpeters ✪✪✪

Spotted it yet? The round sign, dead-centre? It's beyond that.

Another market-hall pub, and another one that was hard to find. It is tucked away in a corner of Markthalle Neun in Kreuzberg, and is pretty much invisible unless you happen to look down the correct aisle. Just two beers are on tap at a time; when we visited they were a rather tasty Pale Ale and an interpretation of a Belgian Witbier that was perhaps just past its best.

Although it is an old structure, Markthalle Neun had shut down and was reopened with the gentrification of formerly run-down Kreuzberg. So while there is an Aldi in the corner and there are "proper" market traders, the dominant theme now is gourmet coffee, crafty knick-knacks, and edgy world-food (the South African barbeque platter was excellent). If this appears off-putting, it isn't meant to be – it's a nice busy place with a good play area for kids, and is popular with the locals.

So too is Heidenpeters. It's almost as if the aim is to produce beers as different from industrial Pils as possible, artfully made to appear crafted and usually slightly hazy – this latter is the current fashion in Germany. And it seems to work – the beers are idiosyncratic and popular. Many of the surrounding coffee and food stalls also sell bottled beers, but pretty much all I noticed on the many tables was Heidenpeters glasses.

Hops & Barley ✪✪✪✪
Based in Friedrichshain, another formerly run-down area that's now cool and trendy, Hops & Barley is a cosy pub converted from a couple of shops by the look of it. The modern-looking small brew-kit in the corner looks slightly out of place, all brushed stainless steel against the old green and white ceramic tiles, dark wood panelling and wooden floor.


While the beer range is only slightly wider than the average for a German brewpub – a Pils, a Dunkel, a Weizen and a seasonal – the beers themselves are jolly good and the place just feels right. There's seating outside too, where you can watch the trams rattle by, plus a room at the back which I guess is for when it's really busy or raining (or maybe for after 10pm, when I think they have to close the outdoor seating).

One oddity was that, apart from the staff, very few people were speaking German. There's a lot of hostels and other accommodation in the area – indeed, the pub has rooms to let – so it can be a bit touristy. It was all pretty mellow though, even a toddler climbing onto a bar-stool to ask for apple juice didn't faze the barman, and we'd have happily stayed longer if we could.

I know there are a lot of Berlin brewpubs that I missed. This trip was only ever intended as a sampler, so I deliberately tried to visit places that seemed to be doing something interesting with their beer, not merely brewing just to have their own Pils. Even then I missed promising places for one reason or another – for example Brauhaus Südstern which annoyingly I now see I could easily have got to on day one. Ah well, I guess it means another trip to Berlin is required!

Brewpubs of Berlin, day one

As with the rest of Germany, brewpubs are popular in Berlin. And while many offer a yawn-inspiring range of craft-Pils and maybe one other, quite a few of them are rather more innovative.

This is an area where northern Germany* scores over the stick-in-the-mud south. Yes, the south has some great beer, especially in Franconia of course, but it is also quite resistant to new ideas. Even those southern breweries that want to do something new or different have to do it mostly for export - shipping it north also counts as export, of course!

So while we were in Berlin recently, I took the opportunity to visit a few of the brewpubs. It wasn't meant to be a representative sample, but I was hoping to get an idea of how Berlin's brewing culture is regrowing, and how much interest there is in the northern beer heritage.  

*Here I'm thinking not just of the coastal states that Germans think of as "Nordisch", but Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg and maybe NRW too.

Brewbaker ✪✪✪

This was my first port of call, not least because it opens earlier than most of the others – but then it closes earlier too, because it keeps shopping hours. That's because it is on a small site in an old Berlin market hall, now revamped with a foodie arts and crafts edge, though still with quite a few traditional stalls too, such as old-fashioned butchers, cheesemongers and greengrocers.

It's designed to look sort of pubby, I guess. The bar surrounds a windowed but roofless mock building facade just over 2m high, behind which is the brewery. There are only eight or 10 seats at the bar, but there are more tables and chairs nearby – these seem to be shared with the food stalls.

Typically it has four or five own-brewed beers on tap, plus more available in bottles. They include the inevitable Pils plus other styles both German and foreign. Interestingly, the non-German styles I tried – Berlin IPA and Bellevue Red Lager – came out almost as hybrids, with notable German characteristics. An illustration of how styles overlap and merge, and how brewing foreign beers is also encouraging German brewers to explore their own beer preferences and heritage.

Eschenbräu ✪✪✪✪

At the street address there is just what looks like an office block. Look again though and there's a sign, “Brew-cellar entrance around the corner”. Ah-ha! Head around the corner, then between two garden fences, look carefully, and finally there it is: gleaming copper brewing gear behind glass upstairs, and stairs leading down to a basement.

Formerly a brutalist concrete space by the look of it, this basement is now a warren of rooms, decorated with cartoon murals and filled with tables – and also, on this Friday afternoon, with thirsty and hungry patrons.

Three or four regular beers are on tap alongside at least one special. The specials are a mix of Bavarian bierkeller standards, other traditional German styles, and German twists on English styles such as Porter and Stout. All are flavoursome, at least a bit unusual and northern in style, and most are fashionably hazy or cloudy. The place also presses and sells its own apple juice, makes schnapps, and is maturing its own whisky in oak casks, which should go on sale towards the end of 2013.

Outside in the courtyard between the apartment blocks is a big beer garden, under a big spreading oak tree and a stand of tall London planes and sycamores. Again, it appears popular with locals, and there's a villagey feel about it.

Rollberger ✪✪
OK, this one's really hard to find! The street address is a scruffy gateway which leads to a post-industrial wasteland, littered with temporary fencing and rubble, beyond which are what looks to be an old red-brick power station (but which I'm told is the original Berliner Kindl brewery!) undergoing renovation and a couple of huge tin sheds, one housing a go-kart track. But if you keep going, around the corner of the power station is the Rollberger brewery and its brewery tap.

Sadly it's one of those venues that persists in allowing smoking even indoors, and it was unpleasantly fuggy with just one or two people  visibly smoking. Fortunately there is space outdoors too, the sheds partly screened from view by wild flowers in boxes and chicken-wire fencing with vines growing on it. Very inner-city garden.

The Rotbier is soft and malty, a bit sweet but still a pleasant interpretation of a Vienna lager. The Maibock however was too sweet altogether to the extent that I couldn't finish it – a rare occurrence indeed.

The nice touch about this place is the barbeque – apparently the idea is you can bring stuff along and grill it while you drink. There's an excellent beer-garden rule in Germany that patrons can bring their own picnics, but I've not previously seen one that lets you cook them as well.

Next: Day two...