‘Boredom on a high level’
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 — but the discussion was all West Coast, about the virtues of various hops and of sour and fruity tastes that are foreign to German palates.
“It’s easy to get decent beer in Germany. We call it boredom on a high level,” said Dirk Hoplitschek, one of the attendees at the tasting. He started a beer-rating Web site in Berlin to try to stoke interest in non-German beer, hoping to spark a craft-brewing renaissance like America’s in the late 1970s.
“The United States has a 30-year head start,” he said. “People are traditional here. Maybe it’ll be a bit slower, but it’ll happen.”
For now, non-German beer remains a small part of the country’s market — just 8.1 percent of sales by volume in 2012, according to preliminary estimates by the German Brewers Federation. But that is almost double 2004 levels, and it comes despite attitudes from many Germans, especially older ones, who remain dismissive of U.S. beer.
“I have worked in pubs all my life, but never has anybody asked for an American beer,” said Uwe Helmenstein, 52, a barkeeper in the middle-class neighborhood of Friedenau.
“I don’t think it would work here,” he said, because perceptions run strong that American beers are flavorless and thin.
But with small-scale breweries springing up around Germany’s cities, many of them creating beers that emulate American craft-beer styles, the seeds of a broader shift may have been planted, some advocates say.
“The older people see beer as a daily nutrition. The younger people are more interested in different styles,” said Thorsten Heiser, the head of exports at the Bavarian Weihenstephan brewery, which markets its beermaking origins in 1040 as the oldest in the world.
In the working-class Wedding neighborhood of Berlin, one group of Americans is trying to create an outpost that sells the styles of beer that they miss drinking back home. They are building a small brewery and bar in the ground-floor storefront of a century-old apartment building, piecing it together with salvaged parts from other bars and breweries. Much of the brewing equipment is from the United States, because it was cheaper.
“My friends would come to visit me in Berlin, and we would taste beer, and very quickly, I realized, we reached the end. We tasted all the styles,” said Matt Walthall, 32, a part-time English teacher who is one of the three American expats behind the Vagabund Brauerei, whose storefront they plan to open in June.
“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.”
