Cornelia Bohn in the village of Schonermark

The next great whiskey trail is not where you think it is

Germany has more distilleries than Scotland and longtime ties to American bourbon.

Cornelia Bohn stands among oak barrels in her whiskey distillery in the German village of Schönermark. The trained pharmaceutical engineer has been producing her Preußischer Whisky single malt since 2009.

Photograph by Patrick Pleul, Picture Alliance/DPA/AP Images
ByMike MacEacheran
February 02, 2021
11 min read

The whole scene along this whiskey road trip is strangely familiar: historic castles and deer-filled forests, then rows of ploughed soil, golden barley fields, and the sweet scent of cereal grains.

But this isn’t somewhere in Scotland. Nor is it in Ireland or the United States. This is Brandenburg, a sparsely populated region in Germany surrounding Berlin. It the most compact part of a seductive new whiskey country that has upwards of 250 producers—almost twice as many as Scotland, yet with just a fraction of the visitors. Factor in an increasing emphasis on grain-to-glass provenance, and it’s evident that interest in German whiskey is rocketing.

(See these otherworldly landscapes—created by Scotch whisky.)

With five compelling distilleries all within a 60-mile radius of the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport (which opened in October 2020), Brandenburg is a fruitful place to taste whiskey. A circumnavigation of the German capital region promises new-found tradition and adventure in equal measure, with warehouses, whiskey cellars, and sampling rooms.

“Distilling has been part of Brandenburg’s fabric for centuries,” says Cornelia Bohn, producer of Preußischer Whisky. “But this knowledge was lost during the Communist era when liquor production was controlled and limited to state-produced vodka. It’s amazing to think that whiskey was an outlaw spirit, only available on the black market. So we’re catching up now.”

Spirited revival

No manufacturer is doing more to put German whiskey on the map than Bohn. Growing up behind the Berlin Wall in Soviet-occupied Uckermark in the former German Democratic Republic, she fell in love with the romance of whiskey advertisements broadcast from uncensored West German TV channels. She took note of the smoky bars, the clinking glasses, the talk of exotic overseas adventures, and revered the banned liquor without ever having tasted it. For her, it represented the West, escape from behind the Iron Curtain, and freedom.

(What did travel have to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall?)

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and Bohn crossed the unified German capital for the first time, one small shop caught her eye. “Everyone was gifted 100 Deutsche marks welcome money on arrival and my first instinct was to buy a bottle of whiskey,” says Bohn, who was 24 at the time. “It was a Johnnie Walker, and it was the most amazing moment of my life.”

A barley field in the Uckermark at sunset

A barley field in the Uckermark region, known as the granary of Brandenburg, glows golden at sunset.

Photograph by Preußischer Whisky

Now 31 years later, Bohn is one of Germany’s most respected whiskey makers and one of the first women to open her own distillery. As Rumpelstiltskin spun gold from straw, she has turned a modest family inheritance into a label born from a teenage dream, producing Germany’s only organic single malt.

Here in the Uckermark region, grasslands tip into beech woods and pastures filled with black horses that, tradition dictates, are still used to pull carriages for village weddings and funerals. The Friesians are central to the local Slavic culture and, fittingly, Bohn’s stills are housed in red-brick stables. The Preußischer mascot, too, is a sleek colt sporting a pickelhaube, a spiked soldier’s helmet. (Preußischer translates to “Prussian.”)

A bottle of Cornelia Bohn's Preußischer Whisky

The woman-owned Preußischer Whisky is one of the hundreds of German distillers gaining global recognition.

Photograph by Patrick Pleul, Picture Alliance/DPA/AP Images

Tales like this are everywhere in Brandenburg, hidden behind distillery doors and in the barley and rye fields. At Grumsiner Brennerei, the attitude towards whiskey is to dig deeper into the past. Distillery owner Thomas Blätterlein is reviving ancient strains of forgotten grains.

One cereal is East Prussian eppweizen, an overlooked wheat used for his fruity, single-grain malt Mammoth. On the nose, the hay-gold spirit hints at caramel; the taste is floral and lightly spiced.

Grain expectations

Less than 40 miles southeast of Berlin, former bartender Bastian Heuser founded Stork Club/Spreewald, Germany’s first rye whiskey distillery, in the village of Schlepzig. Flour mills, witch’s-hat spires, and ramshackle farmsteads point to the town’s centuries-old heritage.

The distillery’s origins began with a road trip. In 2015, Heuser and co-owners Steffen Lohr and Sebastian Brack were looking for a particular cask to take back to Berlin. It turned out that the incumbent owner of one distillery they visited had no family and was looking for a successor.

The Spreewood Distillery in Schlepzig

Spreewald Distillery, located in Schlepzig, produces Stork Club, Germany’s first rye whiskey.

Photograph by Markus Schreiber, AP Images
Spreewood distillery in Schlepzig Germany

Bastian Heuser stands next to a 600-liter (158-gallon) still. The former Berlin barkeeper co-founded Stork Club/Spreewald Distillery.

Photograph by Bernd Settnik, Picture Alliance/DPA/AP Images

“Serendipity,” recalls Heuser. “The absurdity is we went from wanting to buy just the one barrel to taking over an entire distillery.”

Behind its brick walls, the venue retains the cobbled courtyard, whiskey barn, and garden built a century ago, but the brand’s hipster vibe is clearly here-and-now.

(In Germany, industrial sites are now artful enclaves.)

Ostensibly, what Stork Club offers the visitor is stunning whiskey. But the distillery is cleverly engineered on the Spreewald canal network. An added thrill is discovering more than 200 intertwined waterways vibrant with wildlife, including 250 pairs of white storks that return each year to nest. A punting trip into the marshy meadows, where the crank of the mash tun fades to silence, comes highly recommended. At times, it is too easy to miss that the wilderness is in the thick of the largest rye-growing greenbelt in Europe.

A traditional flat-bottomed in a Spreewald canal in Schlepzig

Visitors to Spreewald Distillery can make a day of it with a boat ride along the region’s canal network.

Photograph by Hans-Joachim Aubert, Alamy Stock Photo

“Most German distilleries look towards Scotland for inspiration,” Heuser says. “But we’re more drawn to whiskies made in the United States. It’s funny, really, because rye is part of Brandenburg’s history, but we’ve never wholly embraced it. Until now.”

Transatlantic ties

Pull this thread and a whole other backstory unravels. Where Brandenburg rye really prevails is across the Atlantic in the stills of some of the largest distillers in the United States, including Kentucky’s Wild Turkey and Four Roses, both of which stockpile the region’s crop. It would be difficult, in fact, to overstate the impact of Germany’s distilling heritage on the U.S., with the roots of many distilleries on the American Whiskey Trail and Kentucky Bourbon Trail first sown by immigrants.

“It’s no great surprise Germans kickstarted the pre-Prohibition rye whiskey industry in the 1800s because of what they learned back home,” says Dave Broom, author of the World Atlas of Whisky and a whiskey writer for 30 years.

Bastian Heuser inspects whiskey at the Spreewood Distillery

Bastian Heuser inspects whiskey at the Spreewald Distillery.

Photograph by Tobias Schwarz, AFP/Getty Images

Pennsylvania’s Old Overholt, said to be America’s oldest continuously operating whiskey brand, was founded by German Mennonite farmer Henry Oberholzer in 1810. Johannes Jakob Böhm moved to Kentucky to sell bourbon under the name Old Jake Beam (now better known as Jim Beam).

There are many other immigrant tales, too, including those of George Dickel, from Grünberg, Hesse, who came to Nashville in 1844; and the founders of the Stitzel-Weller distillery, maker of cult favorite Pappy Van Winkle. Predictably, after 13 years of Prohibition (1920–1933), many German distillers were forgotten, and today it is hard for whiskey historians to tease out personal stories from romanticized brand mythologies.

The future of Brandenburg

The blurring of distinctions is common when appraising whiskey, and this paradox is all too familiar to Tim Eggenstein of Old Sandhill Whisky, in the town of Bad Belzig, 55 miles southwest of Berlin. The distiller ages his single malt in virgin German, American, and French oak barrels, as well as scented sherry casks and barrique barrels from Bordeaux, accepting that everyone puts their own spin on a whiskey’s story.

At Glina Distillery, 10 miles outside state capital Potsdam, distiller Michael Schultz is driven to create a rare rye-barley hybrid, using oak casks made by Brandenburg’s last remaining master cooper. This is whiskey rendered in muted, earthy tones.

As a journey around Brandenburg makes clear, whiskey is now part of life in Germany—at once looking backwards to a forgotten past and forwards to a more enterprising and fertile future.

Mike MacEacheran is a travel writer based in Edinburgh. He comes from a whiskey family, with his father having worked at the oldest working distillery in the Scottish Highlands. Follow him on Twitter.

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