Water & Soil

Where does Erdinger Weißbräu's brewing water come from? According to the brewery, from two of its own wells reaching 160 meters deep. Water from that depth is filtered through many layers of rock and stays evenly cool throughout the year.

That's more than a footnote, since beer is roughly nine-tenths water. The brewery itself puts the figure at 90 percent. Water shapes a beer's flavor significantly, above all its bitterness and its roundness.

West and southwest of town lies the Erdinger Moos, once a lowland bog, now shaped by the airport and farmland. To the south stretches the Erdinger Holzland, a more wooded hill country within the county. The boundaries between these landscapes are fluid.

With Weißbier, the rule is: water matters less than many think. This style's strength lies in the yeast, and almost every brewery adjusts its water anyway when a particular style calls for it. The era when the well alone determined the beer type is long gone.

There are no hillside cellars in the flat Erding plain. Aging therefore happens in tanks and bottles, in temperature-controlled rooms. Cool storage here is craft, not a gift from the landscape.

Climate plays a role too: winters in the Erding region are cold, summers warm. For Weißbier, which doesn't age long anyway, that's hardly an issue, since it reaches shops and glasses within a few weeks of brewing.