Return to the German Real Ale

Back in Germany for a flying visit last month, I had the chance to try one of the beers I left behind last time, and another bottle, the gift of a generous friend from Berlin. My tasting notes follow:

Hopfenstopfer, Citra: You can smell the fruit a mile away in this light, almost colorless but cloudy pale ale, brewed in Bad Rappenau, which pours with a frisky but ephemeral head. The aroma may be of lime and tangerine, the sweet rather than tangy fruit, but the first taste is surprisingly tart. Thereafter it's mildly sweet, almost to the extent of being watery. Ripe and bland orange leads to a brief pithy bitterness, but it doesn't really stick around or leave much of an impression. (I may be being unfair, because we were eating very spicy food when we tasted this.) Even if there was nothing to write home about on the evidence of this glass, the beer does have a delightful smell, and it would be a perfectly pleasant session ale if we discovered it in a pub in Baden-Württemberg one night.

German Real Ales

For the last few months some of us have been pissing and whining about the lack of real ales, or beer with much flavour or hops, in Germany. This is only slightly paradoxical: yes, Germany is the ancestral home of good, clean lagers, pilsners, wheat beers, Schwarzbier, and the like, but as a result it's very hard to track down any craft ales of the kind popular in Belgium or Britain anywhere in the Fatherland. It may seem parochial to lust after your local beverages when you're visiting a land with great drinking traditions of its own, and I can enjoy a Franziskaner or a Köstritzer while travelling, or happily experiment with a Bock or a Göse, but for our friends recently moved to Germany, it's a bit harder.

Luckily, we recently tracked down the Berlin Bier Shop run by Rainer Wallisser, on Kirchstrasse near Bellevue station (business card to right). An unassuming little shop, I forgot to take a photo even though I planned to blog about it, but you can't see much from outside anyway: shutters on the street and a sign that we missed three times while passing in the car. There is a generous section (pretty much a whole wall) of British beers, a large fridge full of American ales, a respectable Belgian section, and stacks of specialist wines, traditional German regional brews, and other drinks in racks and cases around the store.

Taybeh and Köstritzer beers

Among other things on Sunday night, we tasted two beers that were brought to me by different friends from Germany. The first was a few bottles of the extremely-hard-to-come-by lager "Golden", from Palestinian microbrewery Taybeh Beer (sold in many outlets in Palestine and Israel, but only three stores in the rest of the world, one of which is in Hamburg, Germany). The bottles we obtained from the Haus der 131 Biere were brewed in Germany under license; apparently the Japanese and Swedish distributors import the original beer, but I've yet to source a traveller to bring me either of those. Taybeh are still seeking distribution for their beers in the UK and USA, if anyone's interested. The second we tasted was a black lager from the venerable Köstritzer Schwarzbier (now owned by Bitburger) in eastern Germany between Leipzig and Jena. One bottle broke in our benefactor's suitcase on route from Germany, so this beer came at the cost of soiled souvenirs and a laundry bill as well as the store-price of the bottles.