The Making of a Classic: Köstritzer Schwarzbier

What makes a classic? Is it merely longevity, or does accomplishment play a role? What about influence? National tradition and style evolution? The answer may always be elusive, but in this series I spotlight certain benchmark beers, much imitated but rarely equaled, to see why we call them classics. Click here to see other beers in the series.

One of the more mysterious German beer styles is not that rare in the United States. The black lagers of Thuringia, the state in the heart of Germany, are more common in the US than either dunkel lagers or bocks. Yet in their native land, schwarzbiers are an obscure style. In two trips to Germany (but not Thuringia), I’ve never seen one. Bocks and dunkel lagers, if you visit Bavaria, are everywhere. Schwarzbiers seem more common in Franconia, particularly around Kulmbach, though when I spent several days in Bamberg and visited breweries around the region, I never chanced upon one myself.

Is this a case like Vienna lager, where the original died out a century ago in its native land, surviving as an expat style an ocean away? Not really. Dark lagers were brewed continuously in the US and Mexico, but they weren’t proper schwarzbiers—often they were just regular pale lagers stained with caramel coloring. In Germany, schwarzbiers were a regional expression, likely not a “style” in the way we think of it, and more likely not a consistent one from Thuringia to Kulmbach. There’s a very good chance Americans would have never heard of black beer had it not been for the survival of one example, by far the dominant brand worldwide: Köstritzer. The history of that beer goes back nearly 500 years, and it’s a twisty tale shot through with power and empire.

Thanks to a forthcoming article in Craft Beer & Brewing about schwarzbier, I finally reached out to Köstritzer to learn more about the brewery. Most of what follows comes directly from Bad Köstritz, and in particular the brewery’s Managing Director Uwe Helmsdorf. Breweries tend to mythologize themselves, and it can be risky to take their stories as factual history. In this case, Helmsdorf offered exactly what the brewery knew about its history and what it did not—and didn’t include any marketing gloss or obvious embellishments. My thanks to him for his careful research and to Doreen Tietze for helping me track everything down.

From Erbschenke to East Germany

The modern brewery traces its history back to 1543, when it was founded as a tavern with hereditary brewing rights (“erbschenke”) in Bad Köstritz, then and now a small town near Leipzig. The brewery picked up steam a century and a half later, when the royal house of Reuß acquired the brewery. Helmsdorf attributes the rising fortunes less to the owners than the customers, however. Students at nearby Jena University developed a taste for Köstritzer’s beer. “That was when the company experienced its first major boom. It meant that the demand for Köstritzer beer increased beyond local boundaries,” Helmsdorf wrote. Most breweries didn’t have the rights to sell outside their home region, but Köstritzer built on their university success and sold beer as far away as Berlin. In 1806, the counts of Reuß were elevated to princes, allowing them to call Köstritzer a “princely brewery.”

The brewery had some famous admirers, including Otto von Bismarck and Goethe, the writer. In fact, Goethe’s appreciation of the beer helps us document its evolution. Writing to his wife in 1823, his friend, the linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, anxiously reported that Goethe wouldn’t eat. “He lives on beer and bread rolls and consults with the servants as to whether he should drink dark or light-brown Köstritzer…” Although it is apparently lost to history, I would have enjoyed trying the light-brown version.

Köstritzer’s modern era began in 1875, when agricultural entrepreneur Rudolf Zersch leased the company. At the time, the brewery was still located in the Köstritz Castle, the seat of the Reuß line. Zersch would later move the brewery into a new, purpose-built facility in 1907 to take advantage of modern technology and position the company for greater sales. At the same time British breweries were using doctors to promote the health benefits of their dark ales, Köstritzer promoted their own black beer as a healthy alternative (a “renowned nutritional and fortifying beer”), again, supported by doctor recommendations. By this time, Köstritzer was brewing lager beer, and Zersch brought in a Bohemian brewer named Karel Holomoucky to oversee brewing. This is a wonderful detail, and shows the shifting fortunes of brewing. In the 1840s, Bohemians were importing Bavarians to run their lager breweries; two generations later, they were exporting them.

The new brewery hadn’t been operating long before the first of two devastating World Wars arrived. The brewery survived, however, but in 1948, the new communist government nationalized the “princely” brewery, renaming it Köstritzer Schwarzbierbrauerei. This turned out to be a lucky break, it seems. The German Democratic Republic decided to support Köstritzer, using it as an export vehicle—one of the few breweries in the country that sent beer out into the world. “As an export product, the specialty beer from Bad Köstritz soon became a sought-after ambassador for the art of Thuringian brewing,” Helmsdorf wrote.

The situation reversed when, nearly forty years later, the GDR collapsed. In a stroke, Köstritzer was now one of the hundreds of German breweries, and it wasn’t sophisticated in marketing, brand development, or competition in the tight German free market. As happened across the former Eastern Bloc countries, Bitburger stepped in in 1991 and bought the company. Instead of scrapping the declining schwarzbier line, however, Bitburger decided to differentiate Köstritzer by leaning into it instead. That was a prescient move; within fifteen years volume had increased six-fold.

Finally, a note on the timeline here, especially as it relates to the development of craft beer in the US. In 1991, as Bitburger was beginning to push Köstritzer, American brewing was in the early years of its own revival, and drinkers were looking to Europe for styles beyond pale lager. The very idea of “styles” was a way for Americans to understand foreign beer, and writers like Michael Jackson would peg these traditions to classic producers. Schwarzbier made the cut because it had a visible, imported example in Köstritzer. As Pilsner Urquell had done with pilsner, Saison Dupont with saison, and Guinness with Irish stout, Köstritzer taught Americans what schwarzbier was.

The Beer

Köstritzer has traced brewing in their own company back to 1543, but brewing in Köstritz dates back to the turn of that century. “There is evidence of invoices for the mending of a brew pan in around 1500,” Helmsdorf wrote. “Historical records show that, at the end of the 15th century, there was first talk of brew pans and brewing equipment and beer was stored in vats and barrels.” What kind of beers were they brewing? That’s a bit harder to say. “Unfortunately, these questions can no longer be answered in detail since, as mentioned, a large part of the house archives fell victim to fires and wars.”

Until the 19th century, lager brewing was an obscure Bavarian practice. The whole of what we now call northern Germany was ale country. Predictably, the roots of black beer, if they go back that far, would have led to ale-brewing. Helmsdorf explains:

“The first beers brewed in Köstritz were all top-fermented. Historical records of Johann Philipp Christian Muntz, who worked as an economy and brewery inspector from 1811 to 1832, show that Köstritzer enjoyed an upswing from 1811 onwards thanks to his work and lager beers were also brewed since at least then on. There were a total of four varieties at that time: Höhlerbier (lager) Schenkbier (light beer) English beer (ale/stout) and double beer (seasonal Märzen).”

I am tempted to dig into the reference about English styles, because Ron Pattinson has written quite a bit about German Porter, but perhaps the most interesting reference here is höhlerbier. “Höhler” refers to a cave. Curiously, the caves appear to pre-date the arrival of brewing. Indeed, this is one of the most fascinating bits about the whole story. “Later records from 1744 show that top-fermented beer was stored in barrels at 10 degrees Celsius [50˚ F] in caves at the ‘Köstritzer Kirchberg,’” Helmsdorf wrote. We could speculate endlessly about this practice, which sounds a lot like the “obergäriges lagerbier” of Cologne and Düsseldorf—the top-fermented alts and kölsches brewers condition like lagers. Was höhlerbier a transition style, fermented warm but conditioned? It seems so.

In any case, Helmsdorf believes schwarzbier evolved from höhlerbier:

“Schwarzbier (black beer) probably originated from Höhlerbier. It was first referred to as such at the beginning of the 19th century and it was probably customers and publishers who did so (in 1839 it was still advertised as “Höhler-Schwarzbier”).”

It’s worth noting here that the history of the style is confounded by its wholly generic name. Schwarzbier literally translates to “black beer,” a term that might have been applied to any dark style over the history of the German-speaking lands. Red, brown, and white were common designators of beer across Europe, but they didn’t necessarily refer to specific styles. Helmsdorf assumes, and I do too, that if you go back far enough, “The malts of the time were smoky. At that time, the malts were dried over open fires with varying intensity, which influenced the smoky flavor and its strength accordingly.” Helmsdorf didn’t have information on maltings or even the type of hop. I haven’t been able to dig up much information on the development of schwarzbier, which is unusual for German styles, but I suspect the generic name and probable mutability of the style over time has a lot to do with it.

Finally, while we’re dabbling in speculation, here’s a bit more. Dark beer has famously come from cities with hard, alkaline water. Dublin is the most-cited example. The reason has to do with water chemistry. When roasted, malt becomes more acidic; in the mash, alkaline water and acidic malts balance, so the beers fall into natural harmony. Any German hearing this probably had an immediate “a-ha!” moment. “Bad,” as in Bad Köstritz, refers to a spa town where the water has heavy minerals. So like Dublin, Köstritz was an ideal place to make black beer.

Until the 1840s, this was a mostly irrelevant matter, since most barley beer was dark. But about the time höhlerbier was evolving into höhler-schwarzbier, pale lagers were starting to light a fire in lager country. Soon pale beers would be sweeping through Germany, but in Köstritz (it didn’t pick up the “Bad” until 1926), the water may have encouraged brewers to keep it dark—or at least to preserve the dark-beer tradition alongside newer styles.

Modern Köstritzer Schwarzbier

All of this background would be a curiosity if Köstritzer Schwarzbier tasted like a dated throwback beer or was merely uninteresting. If that were the case, moreover, American breweries wouldn’t be making these in such large numbers. Köstritzer is special. I’ve gotten to know it over the past decade because, less than a half mile stroll from my house is Stammtisch, the German-themed pub that pours a fantastic selection of German beer. Most of the handles shift, but Köstritzer’s has been on continuously since they opened. I almost always have at least one half-liter when I visit. Winter or summer, Stammtisch pours Köstritzer and, notably, winter or summer, Köstritzer sells.

This is the secret superpower of schwarzbier. The dark malts soothe and warm during cooler months, with drying dark cocoa and sweeter red fruit and cola flavors. It looks like a winter beer, and drinks like one. Ah, but on a hot day, you notice different attributes: the body is surprisingly lean, and those darker flavors have a quenching quality. The key is the very dry, smooth finish; with a finishing gravity of just a bit more than 2˚ Plato, it drinks like a helles. Köstritzer’s Schwarzbier is a chameleon, one of the very rare beers that can satisfy no matter the weather or your mood.

Perhaps the bigger testament to its character are all those schwarzbiers you find in the US. Almost no American brewer has been to Thuringia to sample the black lagers local breweries make there. They have a single reference point, Köstritzer, a beer that reveals what a wonderfully complex style schwarzbier is. Whether they choose to imitate its delicacy and mutability, or make it sweeter or roastier, they do it with Köstritzer as their North Star. For most of us, Köstritzer is schwarzbier.