The Death of the German Brewery Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

A couple weeks ago Slate published Christian DeBenedetti's "Brauereisterben" or "brewery death". It's an interesting piece that begins with a country ton of bad news.

According to German federal statistics released in late January, German brewing has dropped to less than 100 million hectoliters of production for the first time since reunification in 1990. (That's less than half of the United States' annual output.) The same study revealed that consumption dropped almost 3 percent last year alone, to 101.8 liters per person per year, and that it's down about one-third overall since the previous generation. The number of breweries in the country has also dropped—by about half over the last few decades to around 1,300.

It goes on to list various reasons for this. The German beer industry blames the low birth rate. There are simply less customers. On the other hand, statistics show that German youth go for "mixed and energy drinks like Bacardi's Rigo and Austria's amped-up export, Red Bull, whose sales surged 18 percent in Germany during 2009". And of course the Reinheitsgebot comes in for a thrashing as it, or rather its reputation, limits what brewers brew and what German drinkers perceive to be beer worth drinking, i.e. – pils, pils, and more pils.

Comparing Germany and America with regards to beer is tricky. OK, so the Germans produce less than half of what we do. But that's misleading because Germany has a bit more than a quarter of our population. (Roughly 311,000,000 to 82,000,000.) DeBenedietti also says that Berlin had "some 700 breweries in the early 19th century" when Ron Pattinson's European Beer Guide says that "82 breweries operated in Berlin in 1800 and 42 by 1816". Were observers decrying the decline of the German beer industry in 1816 and citing a nearly 50% decline in the number of breweries in Berlin as proof?

To me the situation over there seems to have a bit in common with the beer scene here. Craft beer nerds like to use blinders and view everything from a craft perspective. The latest statistics I could find show that overall beer sales in America are going down. The past 2 or 3 years they've gone down 2.5% per annum or thereabouts. And craft beers account for well below 10% of all beer sold both in volume and by dollars. Yet beer nerds like to emphasize that the craft segment is growing at a pretty healthy clip.

A lot of this comes down to which numbers you want to emphasize. Step back and look at America. We have 1 brewery for roughly every 183,000 people. Overall sales are trending downwards at a pace of 2.5% or so per year. Germany has 1 brewery for every 63,000 people give or take and its beer consumption slipped by 3% last year. To me, Germany comes out pretty well here yet the consensus is that it is in a tailspin while America is the world's beer leader. Again, it comes down to emphasis. The American craft market is doing really well but how helpful is it to compare that to the performance of the German equivalents of Bud and Miller?

While I'm not trying to say that the German beer industry isn't in trouble, I'm just not sure that DeBenedetti does a good job of explaining why it is so because he looks at Germany as a whole and compares it to a very small segment of the American beer industry which is doing well. I found an interesting comment over at the Beer Advocate forums about this issue by someone from Germany (Regensburg?) who says:

The only breweries that have closed around here in the past years are those where either the brewer reached retirement age and he couldn't find someone to take over the business or where the brewer went bankrupt because he couldn't afford the many upgrades required by European Union law.

All this stuff about the Reinheitsgebot and tied houses misses the point, it's been like that for centuries after all. In Germany there is no beer nerd scene. People won't pay more than 2.50 EUR for 0.5 Liters in a pub and the overwhelming consensus is that Belgian beer should only be sold with a Death Head Warning sticker.

Pretty much everyone over there seems to be stuck in a rut – brewers and consumers alike. Brewers aren't innovating and consumers aren't making much of a demand that they do so. And there's the aspect of everyone being hamstrung by the Reinheitsgebot tradition. At least that's what I get from all this. But just as the craft beer segment in America bucks the overall trend here of declining beer sales, I am unclear whether something similar holds true in Germany. Yes, I get the overall picture but are there any bright spots?

And it isn't just Germany. Belgium's beer culture is being "threatened", according to homebrewing godfather Charlie Papazian while James Watt of Scotland's BrewDog brewery recently said "The UK brewing scene really bored us. Everything is constrained by tradition and anything interesting is strangled by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), which is almost single-handedly responsible for holding back innovation in British brewing. The beer culture we grew up with is stuffy, boring and mundane, with most UK brewers making similar boring 4 percent bitters all using the same malt and hops."

Yet there's hope. The final part of DeBenedetti's piece notes some positive developments in Germany.

Starting in 2007, Oliver (an American brewer)began collaborating with German brew master Hans-Peter Drexler of Schneider (a famous Reinheitsgebot-loyal Bavarian brewery that opened in 1872) on a pair of brews, including a strong German weizenbock dry-hopped with American flowers. The beer was highly rated, especially in the United States, and the reception in Germany was more or less kind, though the brew wasn't made widely available…Drexler and Oliver's second joint effort (a hefeweizen, or traditional Bavarian unfiltered wheat beer) was also dry-hopped with local German Saphir hops from Kelheim post-fermentation, imparting floral and citrusy aromas and flavors practically alien to local palates.

Even without American assistance, Germans are pushing the hops envelope. Wernecker Bierbrauerei in Werneck, Germany (some 40 miles West of Bamberg), released Hopfen-Fluch in 2010, a hoppy, American-style riff on the IPA (India pale ale). Wernecker brewery claims it has doubled in size over the last decade or so, and that sales accelerated 20 percent in 2007, bucking the bleak national trends.

Hopfen-Fluch and the Oliver-Schneider collaboration beers would likely pass muster under the Reinheitsgebot, but change could come with or without the purity business in tow. In Bamberg, Weyermann Malting supplies specialty roasted grains in 80 varieties for the global craft-brewing industry. The company's small, pilot brewery has turned out cherry and pumpkin ales (definitely not Reinheitsgebot-approved) as well as barley wines (strong English ales) and even "imperial" American-style ales (which might pass inspections, if they existed, depending on carbonation and clarifying methods), all with the intention of "showing the world, and German brewers, what is possible," says Sabine Weyermann, spokesperson for the 130-year-old family-held firm.

Gasthaus-Brauerei Braustelle in Cologne, a nano-brewery that opened in 2002, is also defying national and local traditions with increasing chutzpah: braumeister Peter Esser's latest beers include a dunkel (dark) seasoned with rosemary, an American-style IPA (called Fritz IPA), a 5.8 percent ale infused with hibiscus flowers (Pink Panther) and what's thought to be the first American-style imperial stout ever brewed in Germany (Freigeist Caulfield).

It took a while before significant numbers of American beer drinkers started quaffing IPAs and barrel-aged stouts so it's only fair to assume that German drinkers will take time to accommodate very hoppy brews and those that are not Reinheitsgebot-compliant.