Pubs of Berlin: The Strassenbahn.

How near to your home does a "local" need to be?

I don't live in one of the hipper parts of Berlin that are chock-a-block with bars. I live in a sleepy, green, leafy part of town where bars -- even smoky old Kiezkneipen* -- are far less common than retirement homes and samey, mediocre Italian restaurants. So I think anywhere within about 20 minutes' walk qualifies, to me, as a potential local. So what about a 20-minute bike ride, does that count?

I can walk to the excellent Foersters Feine Biere in about 20 minutes, and that makes me lucky. I call it my local. But at the moment it's closed for cleaning and repairs after some water damage in the summer. I wonder if the other regular punters in the neighborhood feel like I do... a bit rudderless without it. Even if I only pop in there once or twice a month, I like to know that I can.

There is another candidate not too far away: the Strassenbahn. It's been on my mind because I ride past it on the bus sometimes. A Kloster Andechs sign hangs out front, and that gets my attention. Eventually I remember to look the place up and see what it's about. Not long after, I invite a friend to meet me there, to finally go and have a look-see.

It turns out I can bike there in eight minutes, whereas the walk would be a little less than half an hour. I'm going to activate the bicycle loophole here; it increases the radius of qualification. Strassenbahn is thus eligible as a backup local, in a pinch. By definition you can only have one real local, in my view. But maybe you can have alternates.

The Strassenbahn's name means "streetcar." It sits just outside the Ring, halfway between the Bundesplatz and Heidelberger Platz stations. The busy bridges for S-Bahn trains and car traffic are visible from the pub's shady terrace, whose venerable trees nearly dominate the intersection.

Inside is plenty of dark wood, lampshades, old signage and photos -- strong signals of Gemütlichkeit.** A chalkboard overhead lists various dinner specials, all scratch cooking, most of it in the range of €5 to €8 per plate. Traditional North German things like herring share the menu with veggie moussaka or Thai curry soup. The main front barroom is non-smoking. I gather there is a smoking room somewhere, though I never notice it.

Unusually for a place like this, there are eight taps. The favored house pils is Franconian -- from Frankenwälder Burgerbräu in Naila -- so we start with that. It's the cheapest on the menu at €2.95 a half-liter, which suggests a concerted effort to have a beer of that size under €3. It implies some combination of nostalgia and general principle. (As you can see in the photos, the beers are also beautifully poured here.) The 1464 Pils itself is pretty fine; relatively thin for its region, moderately spicy-bitter, clean. For a Franconian pils it tastes a bit Northern. You could drink a lot of it without much arm-twisting.

Next I go dark, to one listed on the menu as Bruno Schwarzbier. I've done my homework and already know it to be a tmavý ležák, one of those Czech-brewed dark lagers that tend to be richer and more malty than any German Schwarzbier. At 3.8% strength it is a 10-degree tmavý, which is pretty unusual in Czechia. In Germany it's legally a Schankbier. It tastes bigger: light caramelized sweetness, note of spicy licorice mingling with the roast. A lot of character but, again, very easy to drink. Later, when I think about going back to the Strassenbahn, this is the beer I think about most. That lush foam sticks in my memory too.

For my third and last beer I go with the one that drew my eyes here in the first place: Andechser Spezial Hell. At 5.8% strength this is no ordinary helles; it's a proper festbier. It's harvest time, you know? It pulls off that great Bavarian balancing act of sweet fulsome malt, gentle bitterness, and a finish just dry enough to keep you wanting more. Hey, some people think these beers are boring. I meet them sometimes, like this American working in Munich who says he doesn't like Bavarian beers, he only wants IPA. These people exist. I pity them.

There is another interesting thing about the Strassenbahn: It calls itself a Kneipenkollektiv -- a collectively owned pub. Six friends founded it a few weeks before I was born -- that is, a few weeks before Star Wars premiered. According to the website, they suspect that they are the oldest remaining collective in Berlin. Everybody who works there gets paid the same. Some proceeds go to charity.

No pricey pale ales here, no fruited IPAs, no selection of 100 bottled beers. Just a handful of well-brewed and perfectly poured lagers at fair prices. This is why I scratch my head when I visit Stone and see something like Mahrs U going for €6.50 per half-liter. Because it's robbery, that's why. There is no need to pay that much for a good lager if you're willing to look around town a bit, and visit some local institutions.

* Neighborhood bars, including Eckkneipen -- corner bars. Important Berlin institutions.
** Coziness.

A Floating Fest on the Spree, and Its Variety Beers.

Berlin Beer Week launches this evening at 7 p.m. local time. That's when a passenger boat carrying about 330 people pushes off into the Spree for a three-hour floating beer festival.

The sold-out Craft Beer Cruise is the first event among more than 70 -- see the full list here -- planned for the Week's fourth year. It concludes July 28 with a big bash at Stone Berlin.

Cruise tickets sell out months in advance, snapped up by those in the know almost as soon as they are released.* Some of these folks work on the local beer scene in one way or another; many more are the fellow geeks and enthusiasts one tends to see at bars around town -- familiar faces. (Though I like to think there must be a few tourists with uncanny foresight.)

Berlin's beer scene is insular but friendly -- but I reckon most city's beer scenes are the same in that respect. That's what makes them "scenes" after all: like-minded folks gravitating toward something they enjoy. So if the scene is clubby, it's certainly not unwelcoming. That's a biased take from someone who often writes about these folks and their beers and bars.

The cruise features 44 beers from 44 different brewers (not counting several collaborations), plus the official Berlin Beer Week beer -- a "double dry-hopped India pale lager" called Intense Pulse Lupulin, brewed by Heindenpeters and Hops & Barley. Overall the list leans local with a good smattering of others from Germany and abroad. So each participating brewer (or firm) chooses one beer to send -- a presumably special beer, for a special event.

It may be instructive to break down the numbers, for a skewed snapshot of a Berlin-based variety-beer hootenanny.

Of those 44 beers, based on their own descriptions:

• Sixteen are some form of "IPA," plus one IPL. How do those IPA's break down? Three are "sour." Three are "New England," plus one "Mango Milkshake." Three are "double" or "triple." Three are "session." So there is variety, sort of.
• Fourteen appear to have been brewed with fruit, plus one cider. (Reinheitsgebot, schmeinheitsgebot.) Other ingredients include hemp, chamomile, Earl Grey tea, and black salt.
• Ten use the words "sour" or "wild."
• Four are billed as "DDH" or double dry-hopped, including the official BBW beer. Double dry-hopping is not new and it's weird that people make a thing of it now, but hey, people like adjectives.
• Speaking of the BBW beer, the India pale lager... that's the only lager on the entire list.
• There are four Berliner(-style) weisse beers, though only one of those (Berliner Berg's new cherried Kirsch Weisse) is actually brewed in Berlin.
• There are three Goses, two of them fruited. One is Dutch, another Hungarian, and the third is Berlin-brewed in collaboration with a Russian brewery. No doubt the brewers, over their kettles, bowed in the direction of Leipzig.

Quick take: The selection is postmodern, not having much to do with Berlin or Germany. Based on the styles we could imagine it transposed with nearly any other "craft" beer festival, anywhere in the world. Also, not many sound especially drinkable. Interesting and taste-able, sure. Anyway, what would happen if one of them turns out to be a great quaffer? Would my 15 cl tasting glass magically turn into a half-liter? Nah. It ain't that kind of party.

Other Berlin Beer Week events: There are more than 70 of them. These sorts of schedules can induce FOMO among unseasoned tenderfoots. You can't do it all. If I had to pick three, I'd do these:

1. Berliner Weiße Gipfel, at Brauhaus Lemke, tomorrow (July 21) from 14:00-21:00. A celebration of Berliner weisse, and a quasi-annual event that has helped spur a local revival of interest. (But are the locals actually drinking the stuff? That's a different story.) The €20 admission includes wonderfully geeky talks and as much low-pH beer as your tummy can handle.
2. Hof ten Dormaal meet the brewer, at Bierlinie, July 26 from 16.00-20.00. I always enjoy talking to the Janssens. They are free with their opinions and genuinely enjoy what they're doing. Also I could drink their undersung Saison pretty much all day.
3. Cantillon tap takeover, at the Muted Horn, July 27 from 15.00. Self-explanatory. You know, on second thought, don't go to this. I'm sure it won't be any fun. Everybody stay away.

* Disclosure: I have a press ticket for the cruise, as I write for a couple of local magazines (WHERE Berlin and Bier, Bars & Brauer) and previously wrote about Berlin Beer Week for DRAFT.

Moeder Lambic vs. Stone.

I ought to be happy for all those Belgians who get to try Stone beers for the first time this weekend. For some of them, maybe, it will be the first taste of a true American-style IPA. It will also be a welcome event for the handful of expats who care about such things. I know I hankered for an occasional C-hop fix when I lived there. Being a good American and all.

Plus, the Stone mini-festival at Moeder Lambic Fontainas is sure to be a hell of a party. They've closed the street out front. Even the New York Times is talking about this thing (cheers to Evan Rail).

It all starts at 11 a.m. on Friday when Greg Koch will say a few words and drink some beer with Brussels and U.S. Embassy officials... which is just plain weird, if you ask me. Oh, Koch makes sense; being much like the rest of us (albeit more successful) he would happily spend more of his life at Moeder Lambic if he could, drinking Belgium's finest. You can learn as much from this video he made last December. So it's not Koch, it's all the stiffs in suits that don't fit. Isn't this the counter-cultural café of Belgium's counter-cultural beer scene? Still, they should be good for a few laughs. Hopefully Koch will make another video.

So what is it about all this that bugs me? Hard to say. Maybe it's all that American beer invading what I personally think is the best Belgian beer café right now. It could be that simple. It could be that I'm nostalgic for the days when American craft beer was impossible to find in Belgium, and Moeder Lambic focused only on the best that Belgium has to offer. But the café has since been offering excellent German, French, Italian and Spanish beers, among others, and I think that's pretty exciting. So why should Stone bug me? Because it's American?

Is it jealousy? Would this be like me going out with some really hot Belgian girl who spoke no English, having to leave her, and then learning that she's been practicing English and dating an entire American football team? Because that would sting.

Or maybe it's the fact that the Stone event is overshadowing Zwanze Day. Jean Van Roy of Cantillon will be at Fontainas to tap the new Zwanze lambic at 9 p.m. on Saturday, in coordination with 22 or so other pubs around the world. Yet even Moeder Lambic's announcement describes Zwanze Day as an "event within the event." No café in the world is more dedicated to Cantillon than the Moeder Lambics, so I'm sure they didn't mean to make it sound like Van Roy is playing second fiddle to Koch. But that is what it sounds like.

Or maybe there is an elephant in the pub, and that elephant is the business side of things. Maybe, in the back of my mind, I am remembering something about Stone -- which makes upwards of 100,000 barrels of beer a year, and is the USA's 14th largest craft beer company -- planning to build a second brewery in Europe. (In fact, that's apparently part of the reason Koch is in Europe; he's scouting locations.) Stone may be a craft brewery in the American sense, but is it a brasserie artisanal in the Belgian sense? For example: There are certain discriminating beer enthusiasts on the Belgian scene who have nothing nice to say about Duvel Moortgat these days. Duvel has been expansion-minded, but a few years ago it was not much bigger in terms of production than Stone is today.

Maybe this illustrates the dangers of focusing too much on brewery size. One day, you open a café dedicated to small artisanal breweries. Later, a bigger one from another country is throwing a party at your house... and hey, the beer is pretty good.

"I think for the most part, most European beer fans won’t know what hit them," Koch told the NYT, which also noted the presence of a "vanilla-bean smoked porter, imperial black I.P.A. and brews aged in red wine barrels."

"Frankly, every single one of them is completely unique in the European market," Koch said.

Does he really believe that? Excuse me, Mr. Koch, meet Struise. And Alvinne. And various concerns brewing at Proef. And Mikkeller. And Brewdog. And a whole host of other lesser known outfits in various countries that have -- partly inspired by Americans like Koch -- been more than willing to make exactly those sorts of beers in recent years.

There it is again: That pesky transnational craft beer scene, doing its best to make us uncomfortable in our old assumptions. Maybe those days I spent wandering Brussels, with nary a Cascade hop in sight, were the last days of a Modern Age that was already on life support. Now we are well into the Postmodern, and things are getting surreal. Hell, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium might be drinking Arrogant Bastard before lunchtime Friday.

Or maybe I'm just pissed because I'm going to miss the party. Yeah, that must be it.

Overheard in the GBBF Pisser.

All this talk of CAMRA and the Great British Beer Festival and the foreign beer tables and cask and keg and Brewdog and so on...

To sum it up: Our British beery friends like to argue about lots of stuff but in the end will all come together and have a swell time.

Just yesterday I was rifling through an old notebook and found this tidbit from my one glorious day at GBBF two years ago. I quote its entirety:

Overheard in the pisser:

"Have you tried any of the Americans? Have you tried Stone IPA? All right, for your last beer of the day, go for a hop monster. You can't taste anything afterward, but it's a bloody great beer."