A couple of nights ago, the waitress at a local German bar/restaurant responded to my request for a Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest by telling me that they've stopped importing to the U.S. Is this for real? It seemed that they were doing pretty well, getting lots of shelf space, particularly for the weiss. Was she misinformed, or am I going to be missing H-P for the indefinite future?
--NPD
Shite, I hope thats a mistake!
Dunno if that's true, but I bought a six-pack of it at my local liquor store last weekend.
-- Joel Plutchak Boneyard Union of Zymurgical Zealots
"Resorting to personal harassment is a tactic of desperation."
Hell...I remember a German brew I used to drink regularly in the
70's....Dortmunder Ritter Brau (light and dark) I haven't seen hide nor hair of them for ages. I really liked the dark which I enjoyed on draft in so. Cal at a German club called the Phoenix club.(they had great German food as well)Best regards, Bill
Dortmunder Ritter is just a name now. The Dortmund breweries have gone through a lot of shutdowns and mergers; there are now only two brewing companies there. A lot of the old names have been phased out or otherwise made redundant.
Kulmbach, in Upper Franconia (northern Bavaria state), has seen its brewery consolidation go down to one brewing company. In response, some local citizens revived their rights to brewing and have founded a communal brewery there.
There will be much more of this kind of consolidation to come. There are too many factors at work in Germany to suggest other- wise.
Well that sucks. I hope my Kulmbach Monchsof Schwarzbier doesn't suddenly disappear.
Best regards, Bill
Me too, considering I haven't yet had it but its on my short list of beers I want to sample.
The Moenchshof brand is one still being quite actively promoted by the One Kulmbach Brewery. The other is EKU. Forget Sandler and Schweizerhof and the rest.
The other side of that coin: the greying of the German population, now a big issue (the current issue of Stern has a cover article on this very phenomenon; the prognosis is a bit scary).
And non-alcoholic beverages too: mineral water, soft drinks, juices. You can thank ever-more-stringent drunk-driving BAC limits for that. Right now, Germany's at 0.08%; the EU wants to see all member countries drop the limit to 0.05%.
The beginnings of limitations on smokers is just in the barest of beginning stages. If and when it kicks in, it will be done with typical German thoroughness. The poor smokers won't know what hit them.
Buyouts and mergers, yes, and there are also smaller brewers just shutting down and quitting the business, especially family-owned small breweries: the kids don't want to bother with the hard work of running 'em, or there are no heirs to run 'em. The economics of scale are also making things tough; Germans expect their beer to stay cheap or even get cheaper, which is a tough thing to do, especially with the discount chains like Aldi and Penny-Markt flogging their el-cheapo cases of discount house-brand BilligPilsner beers.
Germans are remarkably complacent. There are isolated interest groups, like the Fraenkisches Brauereimuseum, that try to raise awareness of local brewing traditions, but so far, the only attempt to go nationwide is with a German offshoot of Austria's KGB (Kampagne fuer Gutes Bier), and that's facing hurdles of its own. Many Germans are also highly provincialist with regard to beer, preferring the beer of their hometown (or home region) to anything else.
That, and those breweries are relatively large-scale by German standards, and have developed something of an export market, so they can survive discounting. But even more ominous - and already happening - is the inevitability of big foreign brewers coming in and swallowing up brewers. Case in point is Interbrew, which has already bought Beck's, Diebel's, and Tucher. Holsten is also considered an acquisition-worthy target.
There are some interesting times ahead for German brewing.
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