Pump Up The Volume

At a restaurant beside the famed River Spree in Berlin, the air seems scented with freshly-baked bread. But the two big copper vats behind the bar yield a different clue: what’s cooking is not loaves of bread but a batch of beer. Oliver Kassan, the brewmaster at Georgbræu Brauhaus, dressed in beige overalls and green Wellington boots, pulls his head out of one vat where he is tending the ingredients with a huge wooden spatula. “This is where the beer’s flavor is decided,” Kassan says, brushing off a fine dusting of ingredients.

Brewing is an ancient tradition in Germany. The 1516 law on the permissible contents of beer is still on the books. Originally, the law allowed only water, barley and hops. But a couple of hundred years ago that was expanded to include yeast to speed up the brewing process. These days, most German beer comes from industrial-scale brewers. Keeping tradition alive are microbreweries that are usually part of a restaurant and produce only for consumption on the premises, plus a little take-away business. There are nine microbreweries in Berlin. “I’m very happy doing traditional brewing because it’s on the verge of extinction,” says Kassan, taking a break from making a batch of dark pils. “Industrial beer is pasteurized when shipped and loses a lot of quality when it’s made more durable. There’s no taste like freshly brewed beer,” he says.

The Georgbræu has been open since 1992, when owner Peter Härig built the restaurant on the site of a former East German cafeteria. It’s located at a bend in the river known as the Spree Embankment and has seating at plank tables for almost 800 people. “Brewing beer adds a special ambience to the restaurant,” Härig says. It also yields economic
benefits: while start-up expenses were high, brewing its own beer costs the Georgbræu only 40% of what big breweries charge for their products. So Härig and Kassan can keep prices low — $1.30 for a 200-ml mug — and still make money. The restaurant has a turnover of nearly $300,000 a month.

Kassan stays busy, making on average one batch of beer every day to meet the demand, which is particularly high in the summer when customers come to sit outside and watch the boat traffic. A batch yields about 1,000 liters of beer. “Every step is manually controlled, there are no electronic controls or computers,” says Kassan. Brewing is a 10-step process, the same at a microbrewery as in an industrial plant. The only difference is that Kassan’s product is not bottled, but instead is pumped from two huge copper vats in the restaurant to stainless steel tanks in the basement. There yeast is added and fermentation takes place. The brewing process takes about four weeks from start to finish.

Kassan works with recipes he perfected as a brewmaster at Berlin’s Kindl breweries and at a brewery technical school before joining the microbrewery in 1992. It’s a fairly restricted profession: Berlin’s one brewery school turns out just four graduates a year. Kassan adds strictly measured ingredients so that the taste remains stable over different batches. “Making beer is like making soup. Everybody adds a little something different to the recipe,” he says. “Even if you tried to make beer with the same ingredients, it wouldn’t taste the same because the copper vats add something to the flavor.”

The restaurant’s big seller is a light pils. There is a dark pils as well as a spring favorite called Maibock and an autumnal beer called Herbstbock. In addition to the $1.30 mugs, the restaurant sells $5 pitchers, which contain four or five glasses of beer. There’s also a special price of $9 — 12 beers for the price of 10 — designed for big thirsts or large parties.

Along with the ancient craft of beermaking the restaurant offers some equally traditional recipes for food, including Eisbein — a tender knuckle of pork — and sandwiches with lard. Härig says that the wheat left over from beermaking is combined with other ingredients to produce home-made rolls. All this adds to the brewery’s unmistakable aroma of baking bread.