Brewers & Brands from yesteryear - Kaltenberg Braumeister Lager

Kaltenberg Braumeister was a lager from the late 1980's that Regional Brewers hoped would help them compete on the top table with the big lager players of the time, namely the likes of Heineken, Carling, Skol etc. However for Braumeister, although a quality lager and launched with all the precision and detail you would expect from a German brand, it was to prove a short lived disappointment and end in failure.

Competing with the big national brands in the standard lager category has always been tough for regional businesses, they simply don't have the marketing muscle, but that's where the idea behind Kaltenberg Braumeister was a little different. The thought was that a number of Regional Brewers would brew Braumeister under license and pay into a national marketing pot, thus getting more bang for their marketing buck enabling them to challenge some of their much larger peer group brands. Amazingly this did start to work for a while and there was even a TV advert featuring Freddie Star dressed as a German U Boat Commander.

Other Regional Brewers who joined the Kaltenberg train included Higsons of Liverpool, who soon became part of Boddingtons with a combined estate of over some 800 pubs.

My connection with Kaltenberg Braumeister was as a young man who had just joined Thames Valley Regional Brewer, Morland Brewery. In 1988 Morland had a solid pub estate of over 200 pubs but their main beer was the cask ale Morland Bitter, it had a strong heartland following but that's where it ended. Old Speckled Hen was merely a commemorative beer served in nips and the brewers foray into keg beers had been a disaster - their beer was called Artist Keg and all the name associations that it conjured up! 

So, looking back the decision to invest in a new lager brewing facility and take on the brewing of an unknown German lager was a huge step for a hardly cutting edge Regional brewer. At the time I did not appreciate what a commercial risk this must have been, for a brewer to make that same decision now would be ambitious to say the least.

In June 1988 Morlands lager brewery was officially opened and Kaltenberg Braumeister was welcomed aboard. It came with an illustrious pedigree, Kaltenbergs beers being Royal Bavarian which has a special meaning in the history of lager. Prince Luitpold, Kaltenberg's Managing Director is a member of the Royal Family, which apart from ruling Bavaria for over eight centuries was responsible for one of the most important beer regulations - the Rheinheitsgebot - the 1516 purity law which stated only the purest natural ingredients of barley, malt, hops and water where permitted in the brewing of all Bavarian beers. Kaltenberg Braumeister was brewed to the Rheinheitsgebot and much of its marketing focused on this.

Prince Luitpold of Kaltenberg at the time of the launch

I recall Morland launching Kaltenberg with a couple of large outdoor garden parties with Prince Luitpold in attendance, complete with traditional Bavarian fayre of drink, food and the musical kind. Sales of Kaltenberg initially boomed, the launch had gone well and many pubs were keen to take the new brand. With its iconic stein style bar font and good marketing to back it up what could possibly go wrong, but wrong it certainly went! The lager itself was distinctive with plenty of flavour and at 3.8% abv it compared well with some of its weaker abv competitors. However, the flavour was to the be the first of Kaltenbergs undoings......

A photo taken from the launch

At a time when most standard lagers were easy to drink tasteless affairs, the more authentic tasting Kaltenberg was something very different and some of the key target market found this too challenging. It was also said that Kaltenberg would give you a headache. Remember at the time people were used to drinking in quantity and not quality so this was unwelcome side affect. The Rheinheitsgebot was a mark of quality and should have been a positive but to the UK market at the time it meant very little. However Morland saved up the the biggest torpedo that sank the good ship Kaltenberg Braumeister for a couple of years later.

Kaltenberg used a traditional Bavarian lager yeast and this was shipped every eight weeks from Munich. However, sadly after 18 months Kaltenberg suffered serious quality issues to the point where pubs took the lager off the bar - it was cloudy and tasted bad. The culprit turned out to be a cross yeast contamination caused by Morlands own ale yeast. Kaltenberg sales never recovered with Morland customers as licensees were reluctant to try it again and with its reputation sunk, by the mid 1990's it was gone. A disaster you might say, BUT NO, on the horizon was a knight in shining armour, or in Morlands case, speckled armour! 

1990 saw the new Beer Orders come into force and Morland were lucky enough to have a very creative Marketing Manager at the helm (not me, I hasten to add, I was his number two). I recall he took the allocated marketing money for Kaltenberg and realising that it would be money wasted, he spent it all on the launch of Old Speckled Hen without telling the Chief Executive!  However his gamble worked and very soon Morland had one of the biggest ale brands of the 1990's on their hands.

So back to Kaltenberg Braumeister. In my view, it was a lager aimed at the wrong market for its time. It also met with some bad luck that would ultimately be its undoing. It had a lot going for it in terms of provenance and quality and were it to be launched today, it might be a different story. The Kaltenberg beers would resurface again, the Diat Pils version is well known and the brewery continues to thrive in its Bavarian homeland.