Water & Soil

The Isar flows down from the Alps, and Landshut shows it. The river splits here into several branches, the city sits in the flat valley, and gentle hills of Lower Bavaria's tertiary hill country frame it all around. For brewers, the valley was above all a place to store ice and dig cellars.

Exactly what water goes into the mash kettle is something each brewery states for itself. We don't have reliable hardness figures for Landshut, so we won't cite numbers here. That makes the landscape worth a closer look: over thousands of years the Alpine river has deposited gravel and rubble, and these soils store groundwater well.

Water plays less of a role in flavor today than people tend to assume. Nearly every brewery treats its water, removing carbonate or adding salts so the brew turns out the same every time. As old brewers used to say, water alone no longer defines the style.

Below Trausnitz Castle lies the Old Town, which for centuries used the Isar as both trade route and power source. Mills were driven by the water, and brewers and millers shared the same branches of the river. Anyone crossing the bridges today can still see how closely the town and the water are bound together. The Isar, then, is less an ingredient than the town's midwife.

Lager beer once needed a cool spot for summer storage. Which cellars in Landshut were used for this isn't something the sources we've consulted specify, so we'll leave it at this general picture.