Beer Styles

What is Rotbier? Nuremberg Rotbier is a reddish, bottom-fermented beer with a pronounced malt character. Unlike Pilsner or Kölsch, it has no formal style guideline. The BJCP competition guidelines don't list it as its own style, and there's no binding recipe either.

That's why the profile here shows the figures for a comparable style: Vienna Lager, also a bottom-fermented beer in amber to copper hues. This is a point of reference for the general range, not a recipe. The label on each individual beer states its actual figures.

How much alcohol does Rotbier contain? There's no standard for that either, and so no number that applies across the board. Breweries state the value on the label, and it depends on the particular brew. The comparable style, Vienna Lager, sits at around 4.7 to 5.5 percent.

How does Rotbier differ from Bavarian Braunbier, which displaced it starting around 1905? Braunbier came out of the Bavarian brewing tradition, while Rotbier was the older, independent Nuremberg beer with its own brewing laws. No one draws a sharp stylistic line between them, and there's no single recipe for either.

The memory of Fürth reaches further still: the old Grüner brewery once produced a Helles and the export beer Königstrunk. The brewery itself is history, but the Grüner name lives on: since 2011 it has been brewed by Tucher in Nuremberg, following the original recipe from the old Grüner brewery's records. Whether today's beer resembles the original can only be guessed at in the glass, since the water, the technology, and taste itself have all changed since then.