Historical Brews in Berlin

I didn't get a chance to post a blog the last couple of days so this is going to cover a few days worth of stuff. On Saturday we visited the German Technical Museum, which was a sprawling museum that had exhibits for trains, jewelry making, wind power, textile machines, and much more. Far too big of a museum to really experience in the couple of hours that we were there. However, the highlight of this museum was the brewery. It is not a working brewery, but rather an exhibit of the museum. The brewery was formerly fully functioning from 1909 until 1990 until it was moved to its current location in the German technical museum. The security guard was nice enough to give us a tour of the entire brewery and explain the function of each part of the brewery. It was striking how much physical labor must have gone into brewing at this brewery. For example, the malting room was on the top floor of the brewery, which meant that in order to bring the bags of grain to that floor, the brewer had use a crank to hoist the bags up three stories. On the other hand it was impressive how creative many of the machines used in the brewing process were. One example of this was the "tool" the brewer used to test the fermenting beer. This tool was actually a candle, which the brewer put in the fermentation tank and looked at the color of the flame. If it burnt a light blue then the fermenting beer was giving off hydrogen gas, which must have indicated that the beer was in the aerobic stage of fermentation. However, if the candle went out, then carbon dioxide was present, which would have indicated that the beer had moved on to anaerobic fermentation. Overall this was a fascinating learning experience. This brewery was very different from the breweries I visited when I took this class in the U.S. last January (as well as the brewery we visited yesterday which I will talk about later). However, the basic aspects such as the mash tun and lauter tun were very similar.

After the museum we went to a Bier Stube to have some beer and listen to one of our classmates, Emma's, presentation on the beer style Berliner Weiße (Theres a picture below of a few Berliner Weißes served in their traditional glassware. Also, the red one has raspberry syrup added which is traditional). It was a enlightening presentation about an under-appreciated style of beer. We learned that it is a light wheat beer which is "contaminated" with lacto bascillus, which gives the beer it's trademark sourness. It was really interesting to learn that the beer may have originated in the Flanders region of Belgium, which is famous for sour beers. I was also disappointed to learn that the market share of the beer is declining rapidly, with only two major breweries producing it in Germany. Hopefully the trend among some craft breweries in Oregon to brew Berliner Weiße will continue.

Yesterday (Sunday) we had two more presentations. One was about brewing behind the iron curtain. I was not surprised to learn that the USSR was strict when it came to restrictions on brewing and only allowed the production of a light pilsner style lager. I would be interested to see how the frequent grain shortages in the USSR affected brewing. Where breweries still allowed to produce beer or would the government begin using barley to make bread? I also learned that some breweries behind the iron curtain were allowed to make a fuller flavored pilsner and export it to Western Europe, which was solely a money making venture for the government. The other presentation of the day was on the beer style Göse, which comes from the German city Goslar and is a top-fermented beer seasoned with corriander and which is slightly salty and also slightly sour. It is now popular in the city of Leipzig, which we will be visiting on Tuesday. It is hard to put into words how great it is to learn about a obscure style of beer that is only brewed in a few places in the world and then get the opportunity to go to one of the original places where it was brewed. This is really the way to learn. But back to the presentation, we learned that historically once hops were added to beer, beer styles such as Göse lost their signature sourness because the hops killed the bacteria responsible for the sourness. Hopefully the style will stay alive, and I have a feeling that craft brewers in the Northwest will do their part brew this historical beer.

After the presentations we went to an area of Berlin called Spandau, which is an old city with cobblestone streets and old buildings. This is an area you might say is very "European," which on the surface really just means it has narrow streets, a cathedral in the center of town, and vines climbing up many of the old buildings. I won't go into a longer discussion about what being "European" really means (I'll save that for another blog post). Our main destination in Spandau was a brewery. We were led on a tour by the brewmaster and he showed us each part of the brewing process. The brewer was a very interesting and funny guy with a great Berliner Dialect. The brewery itself was a much more of a modern brewery than what we saw at the museum but contained many of the same parts. Much like the museum brewery this brewery had open fermentation tanks, which I had never seen before in a brewery. We then got the chance to taste a couple of beers. One was a Helles, which was light, bready and delicious. The other was Plotz-Blitz Bier which was dark and had a coffee aroma. It was surprisingly light bodied and had great drinkability. Well this post is getting long so I will save some of my other observations for the next couple of days. I am really looking forward to going to Munich in a few days and seeing the cultural differences between Bavaria and Berlin, so expect some ramblings about the American idea of "German-ness" sometime next week.