I now found concrete data about how much Steinbier was brewed in the last few years of this style’s existence. Fairly detailed data from 1904 to 1917 (with the exception of 1907-1908) about the production volumes of Carinthian breweries were published in trade journals at the time.
The last three remaining breweries were Ure and Kaschitz, both located in Waidmannsdorf, nowadays part of the Carinthian capital Klagenfurt, and Schorn, from Untergoritschitzen near Klagenfurt.
Production volumes of breweries Ure, Kaschitz and Schorn, 1903-1906, 1906-1917
As you can clearly see in the numbers, before Steinbier brewing ended, it was on an almost steady decline over the course of 13 years. For 1917, the records say that production at Ure and Schorn was shut down, while Kaschitz had produced a mere 52 hectoliters.
Of these breweries, all brewed Steinbier with an original gravity of 6°, with the exception of Wedenig, who brewed a 4° Steinbier.
This low original gravity of Steinbier also seems to show (although not explicitly stated, so this is slight speculation) in the 1889/1890 brewing season beer volume statistics of Austria-Hungary by original gravity: 6° beer was the lowest OG listed, with a production volume of 2,587 hl (which is roughly in the ball park what all the Steinbier breweries together used to brew in a year), and that number is significantly higher than the next stronger beers: of 7° beer, just 49 hl, and of 8° beer, just 102 hl.
In any case, the production volumes are tiny, the numbers are going down, all clear signs of a declining “industry” that was really closer to homebrewing, serving what was probably a tiny market of aging consumers. Despite the fact that brewing stopped because of a lack of ingredients during World War 1, the tiny volumes were probably a big contributor to not resuming brewing after the war.
In 1893, Austrian brewing scientist Franz Schwackhöfer visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, recorded everything related to brewing, and subsequently published a book about it in 1894 titled “Amerikanische Brau-Industrie auf der Weltausstellung in Chicago” (lit. “American brewing industry at the World Exhibition in Chicago”).
It contains a lot of details about American brewing, but what caught my eye are the descriptions of five different mashing methods that were used in the US and were personally witnessed and recorded by Franz Schwackhöfer himself. In this article, I want to describe and dissect one of them (pp.33-34).
Basic Numbers
The recipe is to brew 130 barrels of wort with an OG of 13.1°Balling. The grist consists of 4,300 lb malt and 2,300 lb of unmalted grains (the recipe just mentions grits, but in the parts of the book, grits specifically from white Flint corn are mentioned).
Cereal Mash
800 lb of crushed malt are mash in with 35 barrels of water at a temperature of 25°C, then heated up to 50°C. 2,300 lb of grits are then added and the mash is heated up to 66°C. After a rest of 15 minutes, the mash is heated up to 75°C over the course of 20 minutes. It is then diluted with 6 barrels of thin mash from the main mash (this is meant to help saccharify more of the starches and make the mash more liquid), and then brought to a boil. The whole mash is boiled for 60 minutes under constant stirring.
Mashing, Lautering, Sparging
3,500 lb of crushed malt are mashed in with 27 barrels of water of 37.5°C and stirred for 40 minutes. Then over the course of 15 minutes, the cereal mash is slowly mixed in. This should increase the mash temperature to about 67.5 to 68.75°C, at which temperature it is rested for 30 minutes. To get to the final temperature of about 73°C, 23 barrels of boiling water are underlet (through a Pfaff) and mixed in. Stirring then stops and the mash is rested for 90 minutes, that’s when lautering begins.
The specific gravity of the first runnings is 19.2°Balling. Sparging happens in four different steps, first with 10 barrels, then 35 barrels, then 25 and finally 24 barrels to hot water of about 77 to 81°C. The specific gravity of the final runnings should be 2.5°Balling.
Boiling the Wort
When 25 barrels of wort have been collected in the kettle, heating begins. At 70 barrels, the wort should start boiling and 15 lb of hops are added. When the kettle is full, the boil of 2 hours begins. 30 minutes before the end of the boil, 35 lb of hops are added, and at 10 minutes before the end of the boil, another 55 lb of hops are added. The total hop addition is 105 lb per 130 barrels of wort, which is equivalent to 3.15 grams per liter. For the final hop addition, more high quality hops are used. Together with the final hop addition, 4 lb of Icelandic moss is added to help with precipitation of proteins (I think this should actually be Irish moss as this is frequently used for exactly that in brewing).
125 barrels of wort end up in the hop jack, where it is left to sit for 40 minutes so that the hops can settle out. The hop remains are then sparged with 5 barrels of boiling water.
Allegedly, some breweries add fir pitch to the kettle at a rate of 3-4 lb per 100 barrels of wort to impart a pitch flavour to the beer, as the lagering vessels are not pitched but only lacquered.
At Home-Brew Scale
If you want to rebrew this at home-brew scale to produce about 20 liters of beer, do the cereal mash with 650g of crushed malt, 1850g of grits and 5.9 liters of water. For the main mash, use 2850g of crushed malt and 4.6 liters of water to mash in. For the final temperature step, use 3.9 liters of boiling water. Sparge with a total of 16 liters of water, though you may require a bit more sparge water, so prepare more.
The hop additions should be 10g hops at 120 minutes, 23g at 30 minutes, and 37g hosp together with 2.5g of Irish moss at 10 minutes. Assuming Cluster hops at 7% alpha acid, this should end up with a nice 32 IBU (calculated) of bitterness. Unfortunately, the whole book does not mention specific varieties of hops, only for another recipe, it mentions that exclusively hops from New York state were being used.
In any case, I think there is enough information available to recreate this specific 1890s mashing method from the US. Not that I’ve tried it, but it certainly sounds intriguing, and the resulting beer (13.1°P OG, about 32 IBU of bitterness, and an estimated 5.4% ABV) actually sounds quite nice.
The (then) new brewhouse of Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, as shown in Franz Schwackhöfer’s book
While researching a different topic, I recently came across an article in the Austro-Hungarian Café and Inn Newspaper (it really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) that I hadn’t seen before. It basically contains general information about the size and the operation of both the breweries belonging to Anton Dreher (in particular Kleinschwechat, Steinbruch, Michelob and Trieste) and the Burghers’ Brewery in Pilsen (since 1898 and nowadays better known as Pilsner Urquell). It’s full of numbers, but because they’re from the same time period, they allow for some interesting comparisons about the extent of the businesses.
In terms of production, the largest brewery was of course Dreher Kleinschwechat, with about 610,000 hl for the brewing season 1892/1893. Pilsen on the other hand brewed 522,270 hl in the same time period. Dreher’s Hungary-based brewery in Steinbruch brewed another 400,000 hl, while for the other two Dreher breweries, no volumes are listed. It shows to what a large operation the Pilsner brewery had grown, while Dreher’s advantage was having multiple large breweries across Austria-Hungary that were all serving different markets.
As for the malting and brewing operation itself, there were some stark differences: Kleinschwechat had about 23,000 m2 in malting floors as well as 14 kilns, Steinbruch had 10,788 m2 with 7 kilns, while Trieste only operated a single kiln. Practically, most of its malt was actually produced in Kleinschwechat and shipped down to Trieste. The malting capacity of Michelob was not listed. Pilsen did well with “just” 9,000 m2 of malting floor and 10 kilns.
When it came to brewing itself, Kleinschwechat featured 3 coppers for boiling wort, 4 mash tuns, 4 coppers (mash kettles) for boiling mash, and 4 lauter tuns. The wort was cooled on a total of 29 copper coolships of a total surface area of 2,500 m2.
Steinbruch operated 8 coppers (presumably smaller ones than in Kleinschwechat) and 11 coolships of 698 m2.
Pilsen on the other hand had 5 separate brew houses: the original one with 1 copper and 1 mash tun (since no dedicated mash kettles or lauter tuns were listed, I assume the copper was used for boiling decoctions and the mash tun also functioned as lauter tun), one built in 1852 with 1 copper and 1 mash tun, then the third brew house built in 1862 and extended twice in 1872 and 1874, with a total of 6 coppers and 6 mash tuns, and then two more brew houses, built in 1888 and 1894, with 2 coppers and 2 mash tuns each. That’s a total of 12 coppers and 12 mash tuns. Cooling operations were supported by 22 iron coolships.
In the fermentation cellar, Kleinschwechat had 2,000 fermenters with a total capacity of 40,000 hl, Steinbruch 1,200 fermenters with 30,000 hl capacity, and Trieste just 210 fermenters of an average size of 30 hl, adding up to 6,300 hl. Pilsen operated 2,000 fermenters, but no volume is listed.
One thing though where Pilsen absolutely excelled the Dreher breweries was the number of beer wagons: while Kleinschwechat owned and operated 60 of them, and Steinbruch 20, Pilsen had much more capacity for export with a whopping 132 beer wagons. With the improved train connectivity of Pilsen since the 1860s (the article specifically cites the 1862 opening of the Bohemian Western Railway that connected Pilsen to Prague by train), it could ship its beer all over Europe and beyond.
Technical drawing of the Ringhoffer beer wagon design
The construction was double boarded, and the space between the boards was filled with a poor heat conductor as insulation material. It contained 2 ice reservoirs for up to 1,100 kg of ice that could hold the inside at a constant 4°C for 5 and half days. Melted water and condensation was drained at the bottom, using a bend to ensure that no outside air could get into the sealed wagon. That way, any freight could rest on a completely dry floor. The remaining space was sufficient to transport 25 casks of 200 liters each, i.e. each wagon could hold up to 50 hl of beer at a time. This was only slightly less than the ice wagons used by Dreher, which had a capacity of 54 hl and could keep its load cool at 4°C for up to 7 days.
In terms of refrigeration at the respective breweries, all of them used Linde refrigerators. Linde had actually been contracted to develop an artificial refrigeration machine for Dreher’s Trieste brewery, and while development was done by Linde at Spaten brewery in Munich, the first Linde refrigerator was officially sold to Dreher in Trieste. In 1894, the Trieste brewery was operating two of them, while Kleinschwechat had 8 Linde refrigerators “Nr. VI” (presumably a newer model), and Steinbruch operated 6 of them. According to the article, Pilsen only operated a single Linde refrigerator, but it’s unclear which specific model.
Interestingly, the refrigeration machine the brewery in Pilsen was using had been built under license from Linde by E. Škoda, the Pilsen-based mechnical engineering company, probably best known through the Škoda car brand and the Škoda trams in Prague.
A map of Burghers’ Brewery Pilsen’s distribution centers across Europe, ca. 1894. Not pictured: Sarajevo, Belgrade
The article also lists all the distribution centers in Austria-Hungary, Germany and the rest of Europe plus one importer in New York City, which I turned into a map to get a better feeling about how widespread their beer was.
In addition to all these statistics I listed above, we also learn more details about the Burghers’ Brewery Pilsen. As you’re probably aware, the brewery was founded by the citizens of Pilsen with brewing rights in 1839. The article specifically says that it was 250 houses with brewing rights, and their duty was to elect a new administrative committee every 3 years.
We also get more insight into the beer types that were brewed at the time: as was still usual at the time, two types were produced, an 11% Schankbier (the percentage refers to the original gravity, not the ABV) that still needed 2-3 weeks of lagering before it was tapped and was brewed and sold only during the winter, and a 12% Lagerbier that was entirely free from yeast (due to the long lagering) and only sold during the summer season.
The article also discusses the modest beginnings of the brewery itself: the first brew only had a volume of 64 Eimer (3621 liter), and the total volume of the first brewing season was a mere 3657 hl. In 1843, Pilsen had a population of 8,892, that’s just a bit more than 41 liters per capita. Could it be that the amount of beer produced by the Burghers’ Brewery was initially not nearly enough to cover the demand of consumers?
In any case, the business grew so well over the years that Burghers’ Brewery Pilsen grew to a size similar to Dreher’s Kleinschwechat brewery. While the production volume was still smaller in 1894, it seems like the Pilsen brewery was prepared much better for export across Europe. By 1912, Pilsner Urquell produced almost 1 million hl of beer per year and was considered to be Austria’s largest brewery, while Dreher Kleinschwechat was “only” producing 594,865 hl in 1912 and about 621,398 hl in 1913.
If you want to learn more about Vienna Lager and the history of Dreher’s breweries in Kleinschwechat and elsewhere, you can find more about the topic in my book Vienna Lager.
By now, many of you have probably heard of the great news that Carlsberg Marston’s, who used to run the last remaining Burton Union brewing system, have handed over one set to Thornbridge Brewery in Bakewell, which will use it to ferment specialty beers. If not, Pete Brown will fill you in on some of the details.
As Pete Brown wrote in his blog post:
I’m sure there’ll be lots of hot takes on this.
So here is mine: Thornbridge should use their Burton Union to ferment a Bavarian Weissbier.
“But Burton Unions were built and used to ferment classic British beers, what’s got Bavarian Weissbier to do with it?” Glad you’re asking.
Let me start from the very beginning: in terms of historic fermenters, there are two big approaches: open fermenters and closed fermenters. The former are basically vats where the yeast is rising to the surface and can be skimmed off, while the latter are casks with a bunghole from which all the yeast (and some of the fermenting beer) is ejected.
German brewers call these approaches Bottichgärung and Spundgärung. English brewing also employed both techniques, but interestingly, Bavarian brewers used to make a clearer distinction, where Bottichgärung was typically used for bottom-fermented beers, while Spundgärung was exclusively for top-fermented beers.
The most primitive way of Spundgärung went like this: the wort was added to a cask, filled pretty much to the top, and yeast was pitched. Any yeast that would otherwise rise to the top would get ejected through the cask’s bunghole and run off down the side of the cask, where it would get caught in a tray. Any beer also ejected with it would be used to top up the cask, until fermentation was finished.
Spundgärung, as illustrated in a German brewing book from 1840
This is of course manual labour, and not the most hygienic, either. So is there a way to do this in a better way? Yes, there is: Burton Unions! The Burton Union is basically a scaled-up way of doing this that is not only more hygienic, but also essentially fully automated, at least when it comes to topping up the casks: yeast is ejected from the bunghole of not one, but several casks, through a pipe going upwards, ending up in a tray that is located on top of the casks. Any beer ejected with the yeast will end up on the bottom of that tray, from where it can run back into the casks.
Pressure (from the fermentation) and gravity do all the work here to keep the casks topped up. And this wasn’t just a British brewing secret, German brewers knew about this approach, too.
Of course, they knew about it from brewing books and journals that also discussed British brewing, but it was nevertheless known.
In any case, Spundgärung is a technique that has completely fallen out of use in Bavarian brewing and German brewing in general, it is entirely historic. Burton Unions are probably the only system where this approach is still followed, at least the only one I know of, and they almost went extinct, too. So why not bring Bavarian top-fermented beers and Burton Unions together? It would be very interesting to see what impact the Burton Union system has on a Bavarian Weissbier: will it change the typical clove and banana aromas of the finished beer? Does it have any impact on the clarity of the beer?
Sure, Thornbridge announced that they will produce a version of Jaipur on it, and intend to use it for some of their other beers, then new recipes specifically designed for it, and of course, collaborations. A lot of it will probably be traditional British styles, because it’s traditional British brewing equipment.
But for me, trying a Bavarian Weissbier, fermented the old Spundgärung way, would be the most exciting and a project I would absolutely love to see.
Just yesterday, I wrote about Pilsner in Germany and how it lost its geographic indication the courts, including a beer named Pilsator. Of course, I couldn’t resist looking a bit more what was written about it in the newspapers after the name was announced. Let’s just say… the classic philologists and linguists weren’t particularly impressed.
On 17th August 1909, Professor Dr. J. Röhr pointed out that the suffix -ator indicates a male person performing a particular action, such as mercator for merchant, viator for traveller, lignator for woodcutter, etc., so for somebody who has any idea about Latin, a pilsator is somebody who pilses (don’t we all like to pils every now and then?).
In a short newspaper article in Bielefeld from the 19th of the same month, Pilsator is called a “badly done portmanteau of two words every beer drinker should know, Pilsner and Salvator”, and the fact that Böhmisches Brauhaus simply used two existing terms made them not look particularly sympathetic.
And on a similar note, a Cologne newspaper mentions that the inventor must have thought about Salvator but had no idea about the Latin roots of the -ator suffix and how to correct apply it, making “Pilsator” yet another “language stupidity” that will shout at people from thousands of ads and countless beer casks and bottles. The author even recommended that Gustav Wustmann should add this word to the next edition of his book “Allerhand Sprachdummheiten: kleine deutsche Grammatik des Zweifelhaften, des Falschen und des Hässlichen” (lit. All sorts of linguistic stupidities: a little German grammar of the dubious, the wrong and the ugly).
On the 23rd September, German writer Johannes Trojan, introduced as drinker and language connoisseur, responded to Prof. Dr. Röhn by saying that that scientific standpoint should not be considered, as “Pilsator” is a beautiful and bite-sized name that alludes to both Pilsner and Salvator.
At the shareholders’ meeting in December 1909, criticism was voiced about the naming competition, but one of the judges defended it that it was good advertising for the brewery and got people to talk about the brewery and the new beer. In total, an increase in sales of 1,000 hl was attributed to it by the directors.
In the 19th and early 20th century, it was common to call beers in Germany and Austria by the place where they came from, a geographic indication if you will, such as Pilsner, Budweiser, or Münchner. Nowadays, this concept is applied to all other kinds of food and drink, and even has its own categories of protection on the EU level.
The success of specific beers of course often came with imitators. Some American breweries were good at marketing their locally brewed beers as all kinds of European beer types. One of my favourite examples is this Schlitz ad from 1891 that mentions Schlitz-brewed Budweiser, Pilsener, Wiener, Erlanger and Culmbacher, all referring to places in either Bohemia, Austria or Bavaria, all of them well-known for their beer at the time.
An ad for Schlitz Brewery Milwaukee from 1891, advertising Budweiser, Pilsener, Wiener, Erlanger and Culmbacher, among others.
The case of Budweiser, which meant a century-long legal struggle between the breweries of Budweis/České Budějovice and Anheuser-Busch, is probably the best known one, but in the early 20th century, also some of the breweries of Pilsen/Plzeň weren’t super happy about the proliferation of the “Pilsner” resp. “Pilsener” name used for beers not from the Bohemian city of Pilsen/Plzeň.
(Ironically, nobody ever seemed to care about Anheuser-Busch stealing coopting another Bohemian place name well-known for its beer as a brand name, Michelob/Měcholupy)
In 1910, the breweries of Pilsen seem to have sued a number of German breweries, such as Pankow-based Engelhardt brewery, which were then initially banned from calling their beer “Engelhardt Pilsener” resp. “Engelhardt Export Pilsener”. The German court then found them to abuse the designation of origin of a foreign beer without clearly specifying that their beer wasn’t from Pilsen, but rather from Pankow just outside Berlin. This initial verdict is quite interesting, as it even specifically points out that a “light [i.e. pale], highly hopped, bottom-fermented bitter beer” didn’t necessarily need to be called a “Pilsner”, and specifically mentions Schultheiss Märzen as a counter-example of a beer with similar properties that makes no reference to the Bohemian city.
In December 1913 though, the Reichsgericht (Supreme court of the German Empire) in Leipzig passed a verdict that the term “Pilsener” had simply changed in meaning and couldn’t be seen as a pure geographic indication anymore, but rather as a statement of quality about the product, and that enforcing it as a geographic indication would be an interference into the “free development of business” by the court. The court also rejected any possible confusion of customers because of the price difference between “German Pilsener” and “real Pilsener”, and referred the case back to a lower court (this basically means that the Supreme court told the lower court what the correct legal opinion was meant to be). The complaining parties, namely Bürgerliches Brauhaus Pilsen, 1. Pilsener Aktienbrauerei and Pilsener Genossenschaftsbrauerei, were presumably not happy about it.
Just earlier that year, they had also sued Geraer Aktienbrauerei in Timm near Gera, Radeberger Exportbierbrauerei and Böhmisches Brauhaus in Berlin to stop calling their beers Timmser Pilsner, Radeberg Pilsner, resp. Pilsator (a brand that Böhmisches Brauhaus had started using only in 1909). The courts in these cases argued slightly differently, namely that while “Pilsner” hadn’t entirely lost its geographic indication, the prefixes of respective place names “Timmser” resp. “Radeberger” made the origin clearer and demoted “Pilsner” to a generic product name. In the case of “Pilsator”, it also noted that the beer had always been used in connection with Böhmisches Brauhaus Berlin, thus always making clear where it had come from.
Little fun fact: the brand name “Pilsator” was the outcome of a competition in 1909 by Böhmisches Brauhaus Berlin that had been advertised with the slogan “Thousand Mark for One Word”. Among many thousand submissions, the jury selected the brand “Pilsator”. As this brand had been submitted by 26 competitors, the winner had to be chosen through a lottery, in which Josef Seestaller from Munich was drawn as the official winner. The Pilsner Tagblatt reported on this with the sarcastic comment that now the Berlin-based brewery just needs to do one more thing: brew a real Pilsner. The Pilsator name continued as a beer type in East Germany’s TGL 7764 regulation, and is still used as a brand name, namely Pilsator Pilsner brewed by Frankfurter Brauhaus in Frankfurt/Oder.
Pilsner beer wasn’t the only concern of the Pilsen breweries, though. In 1911, they petitioned the Prague commodity exchange (Produktenbörse) to stop using the terms “Pilsner malt”, “Vienna malt” and “Munich malt” because German and American breweries using “Pilsner malt” could claim that they were making “Pilsner beer” and that they had to defend their geographic indication in German courts. At the time, the question was referred to the Viennese commodity exchange.
Trade publication Der Böhmische Bierbrauer discussed in April 1912 how the term “Bohemian malt” was really more appropriate as it had been in use in scientific and trade publications, while “Pilsner malt” was more of a marketing term by maltings at the time. They suggested to change the official terminology at the Prague commodity exchange from “Pilsner malt” to “malt of wort colour up to 0.25 cm2 ⅒ n iodine solution”, “Vienna malt” to “malt of wort colour up to 0.40 cm2 ⅒ n iodine solution” and “Munich malt” to “malt of wort colour over 0.40 cm2 ⅒ n iodine solution”.
The article relents that this won’t get the term “Pilsner malt” banned but it will simply not get used anymore in official commodity exchange documents. They still asked readers to use the term “Bohemian malt”, not “Pilsner malt”, “as nobody will gain anything from it.”
Just a few days later, Der Böhmische Bierbrauer published another update about this matter. A report of the commodity exchange came to the conclusion that the proposal was practically a failure as it would only be limited to official documents at the exchange. At the exchange itself, it would also affect the interests of trading maltings that have used that term in their trade for a while now. Abuses of geographic indication should be pursued in other ways, according to the exchange.
Assuming from the lack of further reports on the matter, that seems to have been the end of it with regards to malt, and since the terms “Pilsner malt”, “Vienna malt” and “Munich malt” are still common trade names in the 21st century, the maltings have definitely prevailed.
You’ve probably heard the complaint before: craft beer is becoming monotonous, it’s all about IPA, most breweries just brew hazy bois with a few fruited sours and pastry stouts sprinkled in between, and if they feel extra special, a West Coast IPA. This is usually refuted with the argument that brewers just brew what pays the bills, it’s what people want to drink, etc., which is again countered with lamentation that other beer styles are dying out (ok, a bit hyperbolic) because nobody brews them anymore.
This is not a new phenomenon.
150 to 200 years, German beer and brewing experienced a massive shift. Small breweries were previously mostly brewing relatively small amounts of beer solely for the local market using little to no automation, brewers were organized in guilds, not interested in scaling out their businesses, and sometimes even bound by local law to brew and sell their beer on a rota (Reihebrauen). Then the industrial revolution came and destroyed a lot of these structures.
In some cases it was young brewers with an entrepreneurial spirit taking over from their fathers and looking to expand and grow it using modern technologies, in others it was simply trained brewers backed by money to start entirely new brewing companies with all the latest equipment and scientific knowledge to brew excellent beer.
Bottom-fermented beer became fashionable, and due to how it was produced and stored (at cold temperatures with a yeast that increased the sulphur content of the beer, two factors contributing to a more stable beer) the beer became more suitable for export. Export in this context simply meant shipping it further than what was the common “local” area, but innovations like the railroad made it possible to ship beer quite a bit further, and with the invention of ice waggons, some breweries were even able to establish proper cool chains (a famous example for that is the Dreher brewery in Kleinschwechat near Vienna which shipped ice-chilled lager beer from their brewery to the Paris Expo 1867, one delivery took just 5 days and was kept at a constant 4°C). The beer tasted clean, fresh and properly quenched the thirst of beer drinkers.
People started craving this fashionable beer, so naturally, the market adjusted to it, beer legislation was liberalized, and more brewers had the opportunity to enter the market and brew bottom-fermented beers. At the same time, the old-time breweries where “local beer for local people” had been brewed for hundreds of years, didn’t have the money to upgrade their equipment to brew these new-fangled beer styles, or even to make smoke-free malt like the new lager breweries were doing it.
Within just a few decades, a lot of small, local breweries simply shut down because they couldn’t compete, and local beer styles (German brewing literature at the often spoke of Lokalbiere) simply went extinct because nobody wanted to drink them anymore. A lot of these beers we only know by name these days, a few have been preserved in the form of recipes, though a lot of details like how specific malts were prepared are not so well documented, leaving more questions than answers.
When we look at Germany, which beer styles are prevalent (because craft beer is really just a teeny tiny 1% segment of the whole market) and which of these beer styles are from before the industrial revolution, it becomes apparent how bleak it really is.
To the best of my knowledge, the list is really short: Berliner Weisse, Bavarian Weißbier, Altbier and Kölsch (I like to group them as Rhenish Bitter Beers or Top-Fermented Lager Beers because they are more similar than different though people from Düsseldorf and Cologne may hate me for that), Leipziger Gose, and Bamberger smoked beer, and some of them did not fare too well in the last 70, 80 years and were only just rescued from dying out.
Berliner Weisse was still brewed by a few breweries in both East and West Berlin after World War 2. The biggest shock was probably when Schultheiss stopped brewing their traditional unboiled mixed-fermented version. Berliner Kindl Weisse, a very industrial beer brewed by fermenting a low-alcohol beer normally and blending it with another batch that was just fermented with lactic acid bacteria and then sterile-filtrated, thus became the only available brand on the market. In Berlin, the style was really only rescued by a few craft brewers, such as Andreas Bogk, BrewBaker, Lemke, Schneeeule, Berliner Berg, Vagabund, and others, who specifically intended not to let this piece of beer history die out.
Bavarian Weißbier was already a niche product when it again became permitted for private Bavarian brewers to brew with wheat again, and it only survived because of a relatively small group of connoisseurs, until the 1960s when it suddenly somehow became more fashionable again and thus had its revival.
Altbier and Kölsch were not particularly popular during the interwar period, and really only regained popularity after World War 2: Kölsch as it was marketed as a genuinely local beer, appealing to the hyperlocal patriotism in Cologne, while Düsseldorfer Altbier apparently only regained popularity in the 1960s. Münstersches Altbier, another Altbier style, really only exists in the form of one brewery, Pinkus Müller.
Leipziger Gose was actually functionally extinct from the early 1960s when the last Gose brewery shut its doors until the mid-1980s, and it could only be rebrewed and revived to its original taste because the East German brewers producing it could have it taste-tested by beer drinkers who still remembered it from before the 1960s.
And finally smoked beer. Even in Bamberg, this is kind of a niche product. Of the more than 10 breweries that are still around, only two still make their own smoked malt to brew their very own smoked beer, Brauerei Heller (Schlenkerla) and Brauerei Spezial. Greifenklau stopped their own kilning operation in the early 1970s, but fortunately is still around. Nowadays, they brew some smoked beer as a seasonal product, but their owning malting and kilning operation is long gone. And Polarbär brewery, which I like to call the fourth Bamberg smoked beer brewery isn’t operational since the 1950s or so.
And yet, none of these beer styles are truly extinct or even remotely in danger of going extinct. Why? Simply put, thanks to craft beer. Starting in the US, but now really all over the world, there are countless beer nerds who truly care about these old beer types, some rebrew them at home, others brew them commercially, making these beers that were definitely at the brink of extinction better known to beer drinkers all around the world.
Yes, there is some truth that IPAs and hazies are taking over, and yes, some breweries certainly struggle with that problem, because it’s what pays the bills. “The customer is king”, and it would not make sense economically to brew a beer that would not be as popular and thus not sell as well. In the end, IPAs keep the other styles afloat, as the money earned through them gives brewers some freedom to also try out other styles. Styles that used to extremely local to just small regions of Germany have now gained worldwide fame. Even 50 years ago, this probably would have been mostly unthinkable.
A few years back, I wrote about the demise of Upper Austrian hop growing. At the time, I was wondering what variety these local hops were. With the annexation of the Bohemian hop growing regions, the Upper Austrian hops all got uprooted, and only after World War 2, new hop of different varieties were planted. My research into Styrian hops about 3 weeks ago motivated me to also look into Upper Austrian hops in the same way, looking at what newspapers wrote about them.
In 1863, about 6000 Zentner of hops (1 Zentner = 100 kg) were grown in the Upper Austrian districts of Aigen, Haslach, Lembach, Neufelden and Rohrbach, all located in the Western part of Mühlviertel. That particular article is very insightful about what hops were grown: it mentions both “green” and “red” hops, referring to green bine and red bine hops. The quality of the green bine hops was allegedly very good, with a high amount of lupulin, and comparable to red bine hops from Auscha/Úštěk, while the Upper Autrian red bine hops were between Auscha/Úštěk red bine hops and green bine hops from. It apparently also preserved the beer very well until late into the season, the only complaint was that the prices paid for the hops were very low compared to the quality, especially in relation to the quality and prices paid for Auscha/Úštěk hops.
In an 1868 article, the same issue is being mentioned: Upper Austrian hop growers knew that their product had a good quality, but felt like they didn’t get nearly the right amount of money for it. This article defends the profitability of hop growing even at the prices at the time by calculating quite in detail how much you need to spend on growing hops, and how much revenue you’ll get out of it.
An 1871 ad gives us more insight into what variety at least some of these hops were. A trader from Linz advertised Upper Austrian hops from the 1870 harvest for 20-24 fl. per Zentner, and mentions that it was grown from Saazer seedlings. It is not clear whether this was the case for just this batch of hops, or whether this applied also to most if not all other hops grown in Upper Austria at the time.
An 1871 ad advertising Upper Austrian hops grown from Saazer seedlings.
The same trader, Friedrich Smeykal, reported in 1872 that he sold several hop bales of 1869 and 1870 harvest to a London hop trading house, which required him to prepare and package the hops in a particular way. To demonstrate this, he presented several bales at an exhibition of a local folk festival, as it could keep hops fresh and aromatic for several years. We unfortunately do not actually learn what that particular method was.
As mentioned earlier, the Upper Austrian hop grower were discontent with the prices that they were paid for their hops. An 1869 article claimed that hop growers were only paid 60 fl. for their hops, while at the same time, Upper Austrian hops were traded in Saaz for 90 to 100 fl. This is blamed specifically on Jewish hop traders, who the anonymous author accuses of arranging with each other, thus controlling the prices. The same author suggests that hop growers should form an association to centrally control the sales of Upper Austrian hops, thus having more leverage to dictate prices.
This article was immediately contradicted by an expert who specifically pointed out in a letter to the editor that on the day the article was published, Upper Austrian hops traded at 62 to 64 fl. in Nuremberg, while hops in Neufelden (where Upper Austrian hops were traded wholesale) were sold for up to 70 fl. The editors added a note to the letter, claiming that the author, although only anonymously signed as “an expert”, was a Jewish hop trader.
About a month later, another article was published in a different newspaper, denouncing the initial reports as wrong, not only correcting the wrong price information, but also scalding the use of defamatory, antisemitic language.
Similar to what I described in my previous article about Styrian hops and how they were bought up, repackaged, and resold as “Saazer” hops, reports about similar transactions also surfaced about Upper Austrian hops. Most of these reports are again specifically blaming Jewish hop traders, like this report from 1884 or this article from 1888. One article from 1885 even claims how this relabeling was allegedly discovered in one instance: an Upper Austrian brewer had purchased bales of Saazer hops, and when they opened one of them, they found a knife in it and were surprised to see the name of a local hop grower written on it.
In reality, the situation often wasn’t quite as bad. In January 1873, pretty much all Upper Austrian hops were already sold out in Nuremberg, showing that it must have been a popular product where demand must have outstripped supply. In January 1877, Upper Austrian hops even sold for significantly more (430-460 Mark) in Nuremberg than Saazer city hops (375 Mark), showing that the 1876 harvest must have been of even higher quality than the Saazer hops.
Not everybody only blamed Jewish hop traders, though. In one letter to the editor (published anonymously) from 1884, the anonymous author primarily blamed “Czechization” for local hops getting bought up for cheap by Bohemian hop traders, who then ship it back to Bohemia, “nationalize” it, rebrand it, and sell it back to Austrian brewers under different names instead of their actual geographic origin of Upper Austria resp. Mühlviertel.
All in all, the amounts of hops grown in Upper Austria during the 19th and early 20th century were never particularly large, and with the dominance of Bohemian hops in the Austrian and European hop trade, they never established themselves as a “big name”, while still being able to compete with their relatively small amounts through quality.
Hop growing in Mühlviertel has fortunately been revived after World War 2, but the original hop varieties are nowhere to be found. Instead, hop growing restarted with the originally English variety Malling Mid-Season, grown in Austria simply as Malling, with more varieties that were added later on. Nowadays, you can even get Upper Austrian “Golding”, which is really Fuggles because it’s Styrian Goldings with an Upper Austrian terroir, as well as other varieties such as Aurora (also brought in from Slovenia), Perle, Tradition, Hersbrücker spät, Saphir, Spalter Select, Tettnanger, Magnum, Taurus, and even more craft-y “flavour hop” varieties such as Cascade, Comet and Sorachi Ace. And unlike back in the day, marketing and direct sales are nowadays also handled by the hop growers themselves. At less than €30 per kg for T90 pellets of last year’s harvest, I’m considering directly buying Malling hops or maybe Cascade hops for a future brew.
In a recent conversation I had with Michel Stenzel of Schlossbrauerei Hundisburg, the topic of Styrian hops (steirischer Hopfen) came up. I didn’t know too much other than that most of the hop growing nowadays of what used to be Styria is happening in Slovenia today, while in Austria, only a small hop growing agriculture in Leutschach has survived (or rather, was reestablished after World War 2, like Upper Austrian hop growing) with as little acreage as 80 ha (for comparison: in Hallertau, the total hop acreage amounts to 17,100 ha).
What is also well-known is that the “classic” hop variety from Slovenia is Styrian Golding, nowadays more commonly marketed as Styrian Savinjski Golding, referring to the Savinja region of Slovenia. Styrian Golding started off as cultivar of Fuggle hops getting planted in the region.
Prior to that, Styria had its own native hop variety, simply known as “Steirischer” (i.e. Styrian). In his 1930 Handbuch der Brauerei und Mälzerei, Prof. Franz Schönfeld listed Steirischer as a descendant of Saazer (žatecký poloraný červeňák) hops, together with Schwetzinger, Tettnanger, Neutomischler (Nowotomyski) and Auschaer Rothopfen (red bine hops from Uštěk). This old variety was eventually replaced with the more disease-resistant Styrian/Savinjski Golding hops, I wrote about this before.
Doing a bit more research (basically just checking old newspapers for mentions of Styrian hops), I came across something interesting: Styrian hops weren’t particularly well known in the 1850s and 1860s. Nevertheless, the hops found buyers: in October 1858, a Graz newspaper reported something previously unheard: bales of local Styrian hops getting sent by train to Bohemia, the #1 hop growing region of the Austrian Empire at the time. In the middle of the 19th century, Styrian hops still had a major reputation issue: the quality was fine, and price-wise Styrian hops sold at roughly the same price as Auschaer hops, but once buyers knew they were Styrian hops, they weren’t interested anymore, even when they were packed in Saaz bags.
That last bit got me interested. Styrian hops in Saaz bags? Yes, that was a thing, apparently. In 1866, Bohemian hop traders came to Styria, bought over 800 bales of hops while outbidding local buyers, repackaged them into Saaz bags they had brought themselves, and shipped the hops back to Bohemia. Quality-wise, the hops were absolutely comparable with Saaz hops, except you needed 40% more hops (7 Pfund instead of 5 for a 40 Eimer batch of beer), indicating a lower alpha acid content.
Once Styrian hops were sold under their own name, they actually fared really well. This happened first in 1875, and the German Hop Association considered it to be the best hop variety right behind Saaz city hops (meaning the Saaz hops were grown on city ground and not somewhere in the surrounding district). Besides its fine qualities, it also went to market earlier than other hop varieties, which was a great advantage and got Styrian hop farmers to achieve some of the highest prices.
The virtual equality of Saaz hops and Styrian hops also shows in 1877 pricing, where Saazer, Spalter and Styrian hops all sold for the same price, though in that year, neither of these varieties were the most expensive ones.
Still, the fact that Bohemian hop traders would repackage Styrian hops and sell it as Saazer hops seems like a dubious business practice. They probably did it because they knew that the quality was perfectly fine, that customers would not be able to smell or taste the difference, but they basically arbitraged by misrepresenting the origin of the hops. Due to the poor (but unwarranted) reputation of Styrian hops, this misrepresentation was material to the price that could be charged for them. In my book, that’s fraud.
Interestingly, this is not even the first time I came across accusations of fraudulent misrepresentation of hops. In his 1818 book Das Bamberger Bier, Johann Seifert claimed that he had witnessed how hops had been bought in Amberg (east of Nuremberg), brought over the border into Bohemia, and then reimported into Bavaria with a Bohemian hop seal on the bales. He was very critical of a supposed superiority of Bohemian hops, and tried to get brewers to use cheaper local hops of the same quality instead of potentially getting defrauded with “Bohemian” hops that were actually grown near Nuremberg.
I couldn’t let go of the little mystery of Keesmann and Mahr that I had come across recently: an 1876 address book of Bamberg and the surrounding area connected the two breweries as both belonging to “Brenner” brewery. The brewery nowadays known as Mahrs Bräu in the Wunderburg area of Bamberg used to bear exactly that name and was commonly known as “Zum Brenner” already in a book about brewing in Bamberg from 1818.
A second little mystery was that I had found the name “Ambros Mahr” in two contexts: once in connection with “Zum Brenner” at Wunderburg, and once as liqueur and vinegar manufacturer on Dominikanergasse, in the building of modern-day Ambräusianum, and I was wondering whether these were the same person or two different ones.
Let’s start with the second mystery first: I searched for the name in the city archive of Bamberg, and even though I wasn’t able to get full files (nothing digitized yet other than the catalogue and some photos, it seems), I found that there exists a marriage document for “Mahr Ambros, Bierbrauer” from 1864 and another marriage document for “Mahr Ambros, Liqueurfabrikant” from 1869. To me, the impression is that these are two different persons, not only because of two marriages in distinct years but still close together, but also because the profession is mentioned in addition to the name.
When it came to a possible connection between Keesmann and Mahr, this wasn’t quite as easy. One thing I noticed was that Keesmann was generally referred to “Keesmann’sche Wirthschaft” (meaning something like “Keesmann’s public house”) before November 1867, but starting in that month, mentions of “Keesmann’sche Brauerei” (Keesmann’s brewery) also start appearing. The term “Wirthschaft” is still being used later on. 1867 matches up exactly with the “official” foundation date of Keesmann brewery. In later years, it becomes very obvious that Keesmann is most definitely a brewery: Georg Keesmann is listed with the profession “brewer” as candidate for the fourth election district of Bamberg in 1869, while in previous elections, his profession was still “Wirth” (publican).
Some evidence that Mahrs and Keesmann were not actually connected can be found in advertising: both Ambros Mahr and Adam Keesmann posted competing invitations to celebrate “Nachkirchweih” (a Kirchweih is the celebration of a church anniversary, often in the form of a fair, so a Nachkirchweih seems to be an after-party to that) in 1877 with similar offerings: both advertise Harmoniemusik (small ensembles of wind instruments), Krapfen, coffee and beer (Lagerbier at Mahr, Doppelbier at Keesmann), with Mahr also offering roast goose, duck and kid goat as food, while Keesmann only says “warm and cold dishes”. Harmoniemusik, Krapfen and coffee seemed to have been a standard offering as Murrmann, another brewery on the other side of the city, was also offering these in addition to roast venison.
Murrmann, Mahr and Keesmann all advertising Nachkirchweih celebrations, Aug 2, 1877.
While this is in no way conclusive, I still have not been able to find a second source that would associate Keesmann with Mahr or “zum Brenner” in any way. So the whole thing might as well just be a misunderstanding or a plain mistake in the 1876 source.
During my research, I also found a most likely incomplete list of beer cellars in Bamberg from 1834, in the tourist guide book Bamberg und seine Umgebungen. These were probably just the ones serving customers directly at the Keller and thus worth mentioning. It still delivered some interesting insight.
As most people who spent a beery time in Bamberg have probably noticed, the brewery/lagering cellar of Schlenkerla (Brauerei Heller) is on Oberer Stephansberg. It’s very hard to miss if you walk up to Wilde-Rose-Keller or take a left turn to Spezial-Keller.
So, the thing is, the 1834 source does not actually locate the Heller cellar in that building. The closest one to it is the cellar of Jäck, which is either part of or directly adjacent to the modern Heller building. Instead, the Heller cellar used to be located on Oberer Kaulberg, on modern-day Laurenzistraße, not too far away from Greifenklau. Schlenkerla’s official chronicle on their website mentions that when Johann Wolfgang Heller purchased the brewery, a “rock cellar on the highest Kaulberg” belonged to it.
Still, it’s not clear when the brewery even moved cellars: the brewery’s history page only mentions that the Schlenkerla beer cellar at Oberer Stephansberg was closed down in the 1920s for economic reasons, and that a new brewery building was erected in its stead in 1936. But that still leaves a gap of about 90 years where Brauerei Heller must have moved cellars. I will keep on researching.
