Not finished yet with my DDR talk. Clearly, it's better when I'm giving it in person. As then you get all my bad jokes.
You do, at least, get to admire some of my DDR label collection. I have, literally, hundreds of the things. I just really love the aesthetic. And they bring back back happy memories of the socialist days.
These slides are where I start running through the styles individually. Starting with the most popular type, Helles.
Various types of Pilsner were brewed. With Pilsner Spezial and Pilsator being more heavily hopped an containing better quality ingredients. Some of the Pilsators were cracking beers. For example, the one from Sternquell in Plauen whose label decorates the appropriate slide.
Dunkles is a type that I never came across in the wild. There can't have been much of it brewed. I only have a few labels for it.
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I wonder how much similarity there was between the DDR beer and the beer being made in the Polish People's Republic, and how much either of them had to do with the pre-war beer. Schultheiss had had a brewery in Breslau which was presumably making the same sort of beer as they brewed in Berlin. It was nationalised for the PRZ period and only closed when Heineken got its hands on it in the 21st century.
Your technical details and qualitative understanding of East German beers is amazing. I agree that the labels are fun, and also a little strange. Just the label from Schultheiss was eye-opening for me. We drank some of their Berlinerweisse in the 70s, and I had no idea that the beer came from the east. If only our American capitalist beer barons had kept such good records (in most cases any records).
If you have any information on how the industry operated it would be interesting to hear. For instance, how much autonomy did breweries and head brewers have? Did every decision about styles, recipes and output have to go through a central office, or did they have a lot of flexibility within a few broad guidelines? Was there any kind of competition between breweries, or did they all operate within strictly defined areas?
I also know for some industries there was no effectiive decision making and products ended up caught up in bureaucratic inertia, although it sounds like brewing in the DDR was more functional than industries like consumer electronics.
It's even more fun than that. Schultheiss had breweries in both East and West Berlin and the Eastern ones were nationalised and continued to brew under the Schultheiss name until around the 1960s.
Anonymous,
there were still beers branded Schultheiss in 1989.
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