CulturAle Press

BraufactuM Progusta IPA, Radeberger Group, Frankfurt, Germany

Date:  November 20,2018

The Story—  You don’t have to go to a beer store to find good European beer experiences in the US.  Washington DC’s The Sovereign bar has Belgian specialties you’d be hard pressed to find in Belgium.  Every once in a while a mid-level European brewery searching for the golden goose sends a batch of beer over at a pretty reasonable price.  It never works; when the price goes up, drinkers attracted to it because of the price find another pipe-dreaming brewery at another bargain.  We’ll feature some of the exceptionally good Hofbrauhaus Freising beers we encountered by chance at Tyber Bierhaus in Bethesda, Maryland later this winter

Today’s beer is marketed as a “craft” beer brand all over Germany.   Turns out they’re more crafty, though they do offer beer styles that would have gotten them arrested a couple of decades ago.   When we first encountered the BraufactuM beers, the barkeep was convinced the brewery was a dream come true for a couple of youngsters in Frankfurt trying to turn that beer desert into an oasis.

Turns out that’s not quite the case.  The beers are apparently produced in the large Binding Brewery in Frankfurt which is part of the Radeberger group which is the largest German-owned brewery group in the country.   We’ve read reports that they use other Radeberger breweries when they have excess capacity, but the brewery isn’t talking.

Some of this is like arguing that Goose Island IPA is Budweiser because it’s brewed in Budweiser plants.   It’s not the best IPA in the US, but it surely isn’t the worst either.   The Progusta is in that same vein, except there aren’t that many really good IPAs being brewed in Germany.   You’d do better for the style in Spain or Italy, but the Germans, after a slow start, are jumping on the IPA wagon in droves and it won’t be long before some of them start to produce gems.

We found this beer the the Asbury Festhalle Bierhalle, one of the most remarkable beer-centered food and entertainment venues we’ve encountered in the last several years.   An enormous beer hall downstairs and a huge rooftop biergarten — with all weather tents for outdoor drinking in snow and rain– feature dozens of local and imported beers.   Asbury, New Jersey, has two very good breweries downtown and a few more scattered nearby so you really don’t have to go to Frankfort to get a good ale.   Still, it was interesting and a pleasant enough way to enjoy a bit of Europe on home turf.

The Beer—  Lots of caramel malt finishes with herbal and some citrus hops almost certainly from the US West Coast    .  So…hops from here go there and beer from there goes here.   Better just to stay local and save the shipping the beer shows some molasses, and it’s OK, but really no better than more than a thousand that you can get in neighborhoods across the country.

Value — fair to good.  Not a bad beer — it’s just that better choices abound.

This week we feature a half dozen really good European beers that we found in the United States.   We make pilgrimages to some of the best beer stores in Eastern America once or twice a year and we also just bump into incredibly good beer in places we don’t expect.  Not all of these are on the shelves, but beers much like them are.

Next week we return to the US to highlight some great American craft beers, some of which we’ve found in researching out first US Beer publication: Brews and Snooze-– Breweries you can visit and walk back to a fine place to spend the night.  Look for it in 2019.

About these posts:  We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year.  The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings.   Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.