Water & Soil

Why is the water on the Swabian Alb so hard? Because the plateau is made almost entirely of limestone, known as the White Jura or Malm. Rain seeps quickly through countless fissures and cracks, dissolving limestone along the way before re-emerging kilometers later as a spring. Geologists call this karst.

For brewing, this means the water is rich in calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate. This dissolved limestone is what's called 'hardness,' and it gives beer a slightly rounder mouthfeel while making the mash more alkaline. That suits darker malts well, though for very pale beers, brewers often treat the water to counteract it. Breweries rarely publish exact hardness figures, and levels vary from spring to spring.

One important caveat: nearly all breweries today treat their water, either softening it or adjusting its mineral content. So the Alb's limestone water shapes the region more as landscape and history than as a literal recipe in the glass.

The soil itself is poor and rocky, and winters are long. On the high plateau, this shows up less in the brewing than in the lagering: the cellars in Ehingen's old town and in the monastery village of Zwiefalten stay cool even in summer, which suits the maturation of bottom-fermented beer.

Part of the Alb now belongs to the UNESCO Swabian Alb Biosphere Reserve. Hikers there pass springs, sheep pastures, and small brewery inns that mostly source their beer locally. Both Berg Brauerei in Ehingen-Berg and Klosterbräu in Zwiefalten sit on just this kind of karst terrain.