Warsteiner: Pils beer, a tulip glass & Andy Warhol
There are many things you learn about beer when you’re in Germany, specifically at North Rhine-Westphalia and at the sprawling, surrounded-by-forests brewery of Warsteiner, the biggest producer of pilsener beer in Germany.
One is how to tap a keg or pour beer, which is very important for northern Germans who are exacting in how they drink beer. Unlike south of the country in Bavaria, where they prefer their beer in large mugs (one-liter mugs!), the northerners like it a little more, shall we say, subtle.
In pubs, Warsteiner premium beer is served in its signature tulip glass, which looks a little like a champagne flute, and comes with a paper apron at the bottom of the glass to catch the foam.
Ahh, the foam! About an inch of it cresting beautifully on the rim of the glass. It’s part of the Warsteiner brewing tradition, and at the Warsteiner Team-Academy our small Philippine group — Booze Online founder and CEO Raj Sadhwani, whose company is the Philippine distributor, marketing head Chester Cabrera and legal counsel Jan Aliling, and myself — we are taught how to achieve that perfect pour by Oliver.
“In England, you see the bartenders removing the foam from the top of the glass with a spatula,” he says with disdain. “That’s no good. The foam crown is not just visually pleasing, it’s the start of your beer experience.”
They should know.
Warsteiner has more than 260 years of brewing tradition beginning in 1753 by farmer Antonius Cramer. Today, the company is led by Catharina Cramer, a 9th-generation Cramer to head Warsteiner. She joined in 2006 as the first woman in the executive management team of the group, after having worked outside the company to earn her stripes, so to speak.
Antonius started his brewery at home for “personal consumption,” but like any part-time brewer, he was a tad too enthusiastic about his pastime, going by a wide margin over the allowable volume. He was charged beer tax for the first time in 1753, the date the Warsteiner Group recognizes as their founding year. This kick-started the family’s brewing business in Warstein, a small town located in the middle of the Arnsberg forest, and whose closest neighboring big cities are Cologne and Dusseldorf.
“The brewery has made the town very famous especially in Germany and Warstein itself has only about 25,000 citizens,” says Alexander Arsene, Warsteiner International general manager. “It’s pretty common in Germany that beer brands are named after the towns they are founded in or sometimes they use the name of the founder.”
Warsteiner is one of the five biggest breweries in Germany and in terms of export they are the biggest for premium pils beer, “not counting the cheap beer because it’s an entirely different model.” It is also one of the few of this scale to remain privately held as it is still owned by the Cramer family.
Warsteiner World
Booze CEO Raj Sadhwani has seen many breweries in Europe and North America, “but never like this one.”
First, a little background on the original Warsteiner Brewery. It was built in 1803 in the middle of the village by Caspar Cramer, 30 years after Antonius died. It was called Warsteiner Domschanke, a small brewing pub when Warstein was no more than a sleepy village.
It still stands today and is renowned for its beer, food and coziness. We have dinner here on our first night and it doesn’t escape our notice — that at 200-plus years, this pub is as charming as it is historical.
The expansion of transportation routes to the surrounding areas of Warsrtein and the industrial revolution allowed the brewery to grow during that time. In 1927, the discovery of the Kaiserquelle, a natural reserve of extra-soft water in the Arnsberg forest, signaled a change in the production process. The soft water of the Kaiserquelle today still feeds the water tanks of the Warsteiner Brewery, and contributes to the unique taste of Warsteiner beer.
“Warsteiner became bigger and bigger especially in the last 40 years with Albert, the father of Catharina, as head of the company,” Alexander says.
When Albert passed away in 2012, Catharina took over the reins.
“In the 1960s and ‘70s, we were producing 300,000 hectoliters. Now we are doing 4.5 million hectoliters. Albert turned Warsteiner into an empire and Catharina made it even bigger.”
And yet, with everyone you talk to and despite the size of the company (with 2,200 employees), there is always that emphasis on Warsteiner being a “family-operated company.” The employees are proud that it has remained with the Cramers through two centuries and counting.
“The relationship of the Warsteiner Group to its employees is characterized by mutual respect, trust and responsibility. The common goal is to work together with motivation and engagement for the long term. Employee development at Warsteiner include promoting a work-life balance and a healthy lifestyle.”
So here we are, standing in front of the visitor’s center called Our Warsteiner World. The entrance door — like many of the pubs in this town — is topped by a brewery’s copper still dome, telling you what lies inside.
But, actually, you don’t know because this is a different kind of visitor’s center. The tour starts with a multi-sensory experience — a theme-park-like storytelling in a theater that perfectly introduces Warsteiner and the science of brewing beer — with undertones of feminism.
A bus takes us around the brewery and the first thing we notice is the railway tracks because at 580,000 sqm. in size — with only six percent of this concrete and the rest is open spaces and lush forests — the brewery is huge, approximately the size of 80 soccer fields.
The bottling plants can produce 100,000 bottles per hour, not counting the kegs, casks and cans. The bus stops briefly inside where bottles are being filled by the machines. I wonder in which of the 60 countries around that world that Warsteiner exports to will they end up.
Art, Andy Warhol & Warsteiner
Thirty years ago, Andy Warhol immortalized the iconic Warsteiner tulip glass by silk-screening it on canvas. It would be the beginning of Warsteiner’s relationship with the art world.
They’ve issued special art collection bottles before, but 2016 is a little bit more special for Germans. This is the 500th year anniversary of the German Purity Law, the world’s oldest continuous food law. Called “Reinheitsgebot” in German, it states that only water, barley malt and hops are allowed in brewing beer.
To celebrate this anniversary, Warsteiner launched last April its 2016 Limited Art Collection Tulip Glass Edition by young German artist Andreas Preis. “His signature style — using pencils, fineliners and digital media — is easy to spot and impossible to forget. A look at his remarkable portfolio reveals an astonishing scope of artistic expressions including record covers, magazine illustrations as well as designs and logos for major international brands.”
Reis designed three glasses to celebrate each of the three ingredients and a fourth one that combines all three. Warsteiner uses Hallertau hops, top-quality brewing spring barley and the soft water sourced from the Arnsberg forest.
Reis says, “The idea was to really capture the essence in a very straightforward way. Nothing but water, barley malt and hops… These are the ingredients of a good beer as well as of my designs. I just took those three things, added my personal style and it all went from there. Even though I had seen barley and hops before, a lot of research was necessary in the beginning of the project. Since my style is quite detailed, I wanted to see what those two ingredients look like in real life…”
In 2013 and 2014, it was the limited-edition art bottles that became highly collectible. The latter group of artists was composed of Fafi, Ron English, D*Face or Dean Stockton, Kevin Lyons, James Jean, and Roids.
In interviews, the artists were all asked to answer similar questions. One was about the Warsteiner slogan. “’Do it right‘ for Warsteiner means to do in your life want you really want. At what point in your life did you decide to make the real thing for you and what was that?” The answer I liked best was from artist James Jean, who said that after high school, he decided to go to art school in New York. “There was no grand event or trauma, just many quiet revolutions happening internally from day to day.”
Another question was: “If you could have a Warsteiner with a famous artist of the past, who would that be?”
Ron English said it best: “Jackson Pollock. He would have loved Warsteiner. He would have loved that beer is now an art form.”
In many ways, it always has been.
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Check out the author’s travel blog at https://findingmyway.net/. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @iamtanyalara.
In the Philippines, Warsteiner is exclusively distributed by Booze Online. It’s available at Draft Gastropub, Distillery, Black Olive Cerveceria, Finder’s Keepers, Cerveceria, Meat Plus/Tender Bobs, Kettle and Hotel Sofitel. It’s also available at leading supermarkets Rustan’s, Robinsons, Lawson, Waltermart, Cash & Carry, Metro Supermarket, Makati Supermarket and Pioneer Center.
