It’s normal in Berlin to drink a bottle of beer as you wander between pubs… or wander anywhere, for that matter.
We hadn’t been in the city long before we noticed just how many off-licences there are.
Or, rather, convenience stores that just happen to be piled high with crates of beer.
In Berlin, they’re usually labelled as ‘Spätis’, from Spätverkaufsstellen, meaning ‘late shopping outlet’. It’s a culture that originated in the former Communist East.
Our favourite, glimpsed from a tram, had stolen Spotify’s branding and was called, of course, Spätify.
Alongside dirt cheap mass-produced or local beers there are also exotic imports from Bavaria. Tegernsee Helles from Bavaria, for example, at €2 a pop.
But there’s nothing remotely pretentious about these shops. They also sell Monster energy drinks, chocolate bars, ice cream, vapes, and bog roll.
That the beers are being sold to drink on the go is underlined by the presence on the counter of a bottle opener.
Hand over your cash, knock off the cap, and you’re away.
And that’s exactly what people do. Visiting some Kneipen with Berlin-based friends we lost sight of one on the subway. He reappeared 30 seconds later with an open bottle of Sternburg Export which, he told us, cost €1.
“Back home, people look askance if you‘’’re carrying an open bottle of beer in the street,” he said. “In Berlin, on Saturday night, they look askance if you’re not.”
There’s an old Berlin joke about this, as Evan Rail quoted in an article for VinePair back in 2019:
“Someone said that the police stopped a person to check his papers on the Oranienburger Strasse… It turns out he was a Canadian tourist. And the police stopped him because he was the only one who didn’t have a Wegbier, so he looked suspicious.”
Nor did it take us long to start noticing empty bottles on pavements, and the men who make a living collecting them for the deposit.
Even in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate they dodge between American tourists filling tattered carrier bags, clink, clank.
When our pub-crawling companion – otherwise a very tidy, law-abiding sort – finished his Wegbier, he placed the bottle carefully on the ground near a bin.
Why make the professional scavengers dig around in the filth?
And it’s not as if it will be there long.
It’s a very efficient system, exploitative as it might be.
Wegbier isn’t the preserve of rebels and youngsters, either.
One weekday afternoon we watched a smartly-dressed thirty-something couple escorting their small children along the street.
Both parents were carrying open bottles of lager as casually as someone in Britain might carry a to-go cappuccino.
What if you can simply decide not to be drunk?
What if you can drink constantly, without a Teku glass in sight, and retain total responsible respectability?
Though it didn’t come naturally to us, we decided to try to fit in. We popped into a Späti for a between-pub pick-me-up and, overwhelmed by choice, also went for Sternburg Export.
It’s not the most exciting beer in the world but it doesn’t need to be when you’re swigging straight from the bottle on a busy street in one of the most interesting cities in the world.
Under the glow of traffic lights and kebab shop neon it felt positively glamorous, or delightfully seedy. It adds a swagger to your step.
Looking down into the gutter, we laughed. The road surface was studded, of course, with hundreds of rustling bottle caps pressed into the tar. And a layer of fresh bottle caps had already begun to form, like a tide line.
“We should do this more often,” we said.
Then, on our last morning in Berlin, we saw another bottle of Sternburg swinging past in the street.
Glancing up at its owner we saw a face that looked as if it had been hit by a brewery dray. Yellow eyes, bloody nose, bruises, and a look of forlorn befuddlement.
Perhaps, after all, it is good to pause.
Maybe we can just enjoy some fresh air on the walk between pubs.
And keep Wegbier as a treat when we’re in Germany, doing as the Germans do.
6 replies on “The Way of the Wegbier in Berlin”
This relates to the way in which day-to-day alcohol consumption has been denormalised in the UK – or, looking back up the slope, as it were, how bizarrely normal everyday boozing used to be! (See also Friday lunch.)
There probably is a level of alcohol consumption which is both higher than what most people in the UK are now used to and basically harmless; and there are certainly societies drinking at levels that are more harmful, but in ways that people are willing to trade off or ignore. Which of the two were you looking at in Berlin – or was it both? (Rhetorical question!)
in Berlin a few weeks ago, I became obsessed with the deposit return machine in the supermarket. All our soft drinks cans, beer bottles and juice bottles went back in, often giving enough credit for another beer or can. Just using the retail barcode rather than the dedicated barcode proposed in the UK. And our nearest corner shop was the only place I found a bottle of Kindl Berliner Weisse without syrup. The biggest benefit of those discarded beer and wine bottles was to distract the hordes of wasps. Briefly
I lived briefly in Berlin during the cold winter of 2010 and spent hours and hours walking around drinking Berliner Kindl. Good training for lockdown one…
[…] insightful writing about the observed beer culture there, one about five Pilsners and another about wegbiers – beers bought in small shops for drinking on the way as you walk from one place to […]
When I was in London with a friend last year, we also did “Wegbiers” there. Although we wondered if it was allowed and just frowned upon or if it was forbidden!?
Allowed, but slightly unusual, in most streets. Not allowed in some parks, and not allowed on public transport – although that ban is barely enforced.