Where to Find the Best Craft Beer in Berlin, Berlin, Germany

For those of you who’ve been following us for a while, you know we love craft beers and take it as a challenge to track down the best local craft beer establishments wherever we are at the time. In the summer of 2022, we spent six weeks enjoying (amongst other things) as much craft beer in Berlin as possible.

Germany has a stringent, long-standing beer purity law. The ‘Reinheitsgebot’ is a regulation limiting beer to four essential ingredients: water, barley, hops, and yeast. It was created in 1516 and enforced throughout Germany and the states of the former Holy Roman Empire, becoming the world’s oldest regulation related to food and drink.

Germans are very serious about this law. One guy we met in a Peine bar in Lower Saxony told us, ‘ If the Reinheitsgebot is broken, the friendship is broken!’ Eeek!!!

We quickly steered the subject away from beer! There was even a movement to have it UNESCO World Heritage-listed, like the Argentinian Tango and French Gastronomy.

Not surprisingly, these limitations prevented modern brewers from joining the burgeoning worldwide craft beer movement. Thankfully, the regulations have slowly loosened up, and by the time we visited in 2022, there was a thriving craft beer scene in Berlin. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).