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Brewery Tours

Posted by Barm on 2019-06-24 07:47:17

The  great reputation of Munich beer in the US is, I believe, a 20th-century, possibly even post-WW2 phenomenon. Pre-prohibition texts seem to refer a lot to Erlanger and Würzburger. Würzburger Hofbräu of course, there’s another city brewery swallowed up by the Kulmbacher. When I started visiting Franconia the saying was still pretty much true that every decent-sized town had its own brewery and that was what you drank at the local festival. The local sports clubs would all serve it and it was advertised on the sides of local buses. Hiernickel in Hassfurt, Brauhaus Schweinfurt, Würzburger Hofbräu, Kitzmann. Elsewhere in Germany Königsbacher in Koblenz, Schwelmer, Iserlohner. And of course the catastrophic decline of the Dortmund breweries. All washed away by a deluge of Krombacher and Radeberger.   People have been bemoaning the crisis of overcapacity in German brewing for decades. Many breweries that find themselves in trouble attempt to save themselves by brewing cheap own-label beer for supermarkets. It fails because the business is built on sand: the supermarkets will switch to another supplier in a heartbeat if it saves money, and indeed the own-label commodity beer, with no producer listed on the package beyond “Made in Germany” is designed to make the actual brewery abstract, anonymous and replaceable.

Followups:

Brewery Tours by Nick B. (formerly in Erlangen) on  2019-07-05 08:40:03