The Soul of a Beer Reincarnate
Beer is history. Every pint, if you care to peer deeply enough into it, contains a story that stretches back decades or centuries. We like to kid ourselves about innovation, but even the shiniest new object—go ahead, take Smooj as an example—borrows from the wisdom of our ancestors. In most cases, the lineage proceeds backward through time like links in a chain, one evolution at a time. (Guinness Draught offers one of the clearest examples, if you want to see what I mean.)
Brewing history is also littered with broken chains ending in names like Peeterman and Merseburger. Sometimes beers don’t evolve fast enough, or perhaps they contain flavors or textures that no longer have any place in our steel-and-concrete ecosystems. Many of those old styles just weren’t built for modernity, and descriptions are enough to explain why they didn’t make it. (Peeterman: “viscous, very brown-coloured and … a slightly penetrating and aromatic bouquet.” Merseburger: “bitter as the death in a gallows.”) Yet the death of some styles is a true tragedy, even if the living don’t realize what they’ve lost.
Berliner weisse is one of those extremely rare styles that died, only to be reincarnated before memory and resource passed beyond retrieval. Until the 20th century, beers made with wild yeast and bacteria were common—indeed they probably outnumbered “clean” styles. When Pasteur gazed through a microscope at the tiny bodies of these beings, he numbered their days. Berliner weisse, properly made with both Lactobacillus and Brettanomyces, survived in part because of slow innovation on the east side of the wall during the cold war, though even there the taste for bright, complex acidic beers was in steep decline. The last brewery to make the city’s classic weissbier, Schultheiss, merged with Kindl (a brewery by then making a debased, Lacto-only version), and that was it for the traditional product.
Except it wasn’t. Those final bottles of Schultheiss contained the soul of Berliner weisse—a fine layer of white dusting their rounded floors. Fans living in Berlin bought up the final lots by the case, stowing them in cellars and cupboards. One of the purchasers was Alan Taylor, the Berlin-trained brewer who founded Zoiglhaus a few years ago. He became one of the Quixote-like figures who couldn’t give up on the beer, despite its poor commercial prospects. Like Oliver Lemke and Ulrike Genz in Berlin and Jace Marti in the US, they plotted to revive the tradition that died with Schultheiss. (All of them went to Berlin’s VLB brewing school or were connected to it—where historical accounts and records of Berliner weisse were still housed. In addition to capturing their bottled souls, these brewers had detailed records on how they were made.)
Alan brought his bottles of Schultheiss back to the US, where his stash has slowly dwindled. He still had one precious bottle of left, secreted away in the brewery for a special occasion. Yesterday, as we sampled the weissbier he releases each summer, the moment arrived. He also had a few other examples squirreled away, but the real prize was that old Schultheiss, that ghost of a lost age. With his brewers and I gathered around, we took a trip into the past.
Alan was disappointed to find that the Schultheiss was a little past its prime. It had a woody, oxidized note that came rushing in just as you swallowed. But swirling the beer around my mouth, I tasted a lemony elixir with clean acidity and hints of stone-fruit esters. It may not have been as fresh as the day it was released, but I had no point of comparison. Instead, I reveled in the flavors I’d only ever encountered through description. Language has all kinds of limitations when compared with experience, and that’s especially true with a beer that has been lost for a decade and a half.
After he brought bottles of Schultheiss home to the US, Alan had the Lactobaccilus and Brettanomyces cultured, and now he uses those in the beer he makes at Zoiglhaus. Brewed in the summer and aged a year, it bristles with character. The subtle elements time destroyed in the Schultheiss are present in this version—a hint of bready wheat, a delicately herbaceous quality that seems to come from some alchemy of fermentation (Alan: “it’s definitely not the hops!”), Chardonnay fruitiness, and that bright, lemony acidity of Schultheiss.
It’s not Schultheiss, though. The process he uses is somewhat different, his brewhouse and vessels are different, and he uses different malt and hops. Yet the soul of Schultheiss, represented not just by the yeast and bacteria, but a tradition of craft that dates back hundreds of years, is there. A Berliner from Napoleon’s time, when his army raved about the beer, would surely recognize it. Alan introduced me to proper, Brettanomyces-laced Berliner weisse eight years ago, when Schultheiss was just seven years departed. At that time, the GABF was telling breweries that Brett shouldn’t be in Berliner weisse. It was dark days for the style, and I wasn’t sure it would survive. Now more and more breweries make it the old way (though far more make smoothie sours they call Berliner weisse, which could be the subject of an entirely different post). Fans are still not what you’d call abundant, but neither are they absent. They can support the volume Zoiglhaus produces.
So perhaps it was right to wait this long to try that old bottle. The beer may have been a bit oxidized, but there was no melancholy in the taste. Schultheiss may be gone, but Berliner weisse will survive.