Yankee Brew News Archive

Brewer's Profile: Horst Dornbusch

Originally Published: 10/96

By: Kerry J. Byrne

Horst Dornbusch is the founder, brewer, PR agent and spokesmodel for the Dornbusch Brewing Company of Ipswich, Massachusetts. A native of Dusseldorf, Germany, he moved to the United States in 1969 at the spritely age of 22. After living in Canada for several years he moved to Massachusetts in 1974.

A homebrewer since the 1970s, Dornbusch took the plunge into the commercial brewing business in 1994. His beer first hit the shelves on May 26, 1995.

His company produces two products, Dornbusch Alt and Dornbusch Gold (a Dortmund lager), under contract arrangements with Ipswich Brewing Company of Massachusetts and Smuttynose Brewing Company of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His products are available in resealable liter bottles and six-packs of 12-ounce bottles. The liters are produced at Ipswich while the six-packs are made at Smuttynose.

Dornbusch has plans to introduce several other German-style beers, including a helles, black lager, triple bock, bock and dunkel hefe-weizen.

I got a chance to sit down with Dornbusch and discuss his views of beer, American beer culture and what he feels is the authenticity of his German-style beers.

YBN: Being raised in Dusseldorf, obviously you must have been used to drinking beer. What did you think about beer in this country when you moved here?

HD: When I moved here, naturally, being a good German, I wanted to have a beer. At the store I went to the door with the sign for beer, reached in and grabbed what I thought was a beer. When I got home I realized it was some sort of alcoholic malt beverage, but it certainly wasn't a beer. My friends told me I had taken the wrong brand, so I went back and tried them all and couldn't really tell the difference. I figured that was a great drawback in this country. You didn't have what we call beer. And imports in those days were not really available, and to the extent that they were available, they weren't fresh and they were expensive.

YBN: Did it strike you as odd that there are these German-named lagers that didn't taste like German beers?

HD: In those days I didn't have a clear idea why Americans didn't have real beer, I just accepted the fact that you didn't. It made me appreciate the fact that maybe good beer is part of a culture that was alien to the New World.

I have had good beers in Great Britain as well, so it wasn't just a question of Americans not making good German beers, they just didn't make any good beers.

YBN: Do you still think that, or have you come to realize that there was a beer culture in this country--there was a time when Americans made every kind of beer you'd find in Europe?

HD: In those days I didn't know that. I didn't think that Americans had a beer culture but had lost it. It's not something I was familiar with. I just knew I couldn't find it.

YBN: What prompted you to do a lager? They're rare among American microbreweries.

HD: After I decided I wanted to get out of my high-pressure job (as a technical editor at Seimens), which, with any luck, would have killed me, I always thought opening a brewery would be a fun thing to do. And since the micro revolution started I realized that indeed it can be done. I, too, wanted to do it.

I got around to formulating a business plan and getting everything together, and after I learned from Ipswich (Brewing Company) how to actually brew beer commercially, I started reading a lot of books about the biochemistry of beer and about processes. By the time I was ready to jump in, I realized there were so many breweries in the market already, and they're all making pale ales. It would be very hard to distinguish our beers from others on the shelves.

I figured, what needed to be done, perhaps, is to be different. I also realized that no one is tackling German-style beers, the beers I used to like in my youth. I figured maybe that's the angle I can exploit, go for the niche market...especially since I knew what that beer was supposed to taste like. I had studied the textbooks and I knew how to make them.

By that time I had worked out test batches in my kitchen. I had a battery of refrigerators I had hooked up so I could maintain proper temperatures for cold-fermenting lager yeasts, and had rigged up a refrigerator which I could cool the temperature down to 32 degrees Fahrenheit for proper lagering. I had played with the grain bills. Friends from Germany had been over and they taste-tested tested the beers and pronounced them pretty comparable to what they had over there. So I knew I had a couple of authentic recipes.

I knew I could replicate the good beers of Germany, only make them fresh and locally. So it was time for me to get serious and start getting the money together. I sold my house, liquidated my Seimens pension plan, Seimens savings account, liquidated everything I had. I quit my job in February of last year. That was my last regular paycheck. Basically I liquidated all my assets and put them into the business.

YBN: You mention your friends from Germany. You also mentioned (when we spoke earlier) a fellow from Austria named Conrad Siedl, a beer journalist over there.

HD: Yes, he's sort of the Michael Jackson of the German language. He was on a tour here, sort of checking out American micros, and he heard of us so he wanted to know what this German-style beer tasted like.

I gave him a blind taste test and asked him if he could identify these beers and he could. He pronounced one a Dortmund lager and other one he said was an alt which was roughly in the middle between an Uerige and a Fuchschen alt or Schlosser Alt. He hit it right on the money. I was very proud. I told him what it was, or what I thought they were. So he confirmed that they were indeed authentic in taste.

He went back to Vienna, wrote an article for an Austrian gourmet magazine and told his Austrian readers that if they wanted to have a good Dusseldorf alt they should go to America.

YBN: About the alt. There are other alt beers made here. How does yours differ?

HD: I believe few people (in the U.S. ) know the alt beer style well enough to know whether or not an alt beer made here is either a good alt beer or an authentic alt. In my view the style is so little understood and known that it is hard even for judges to tell whether or not a beer presented as an alt beer really merits the designation.

YBN: What makes yours authentic?

HD: Our alt beer is authentic in several ways. A good alt beer is a full-bodied beer, thus you need a protein rest. Or, if you use undermodified malt, you need decoction (mashing). If you make an alt using a single infusion mash, it will not be right.

YBN: You don't do a decoction mash.

HD: We don't do a decoction because we are using North American fully-modified grains. I do not believe that you need to go through the traditional and rather messy decoction method to produce a good European-style beer. With modern grains a two-step infusion mash is sufficient.

YBN: Why two steps?

HD: You need to change the large-chain protein molecules into small-chain protein molecules. If you don't do that they will flocculate out of the brew kettle. Once they flocculate out you get less body in the beer.

If you do proteolytic conversion, when proteolytic enzymes become active, and they become active at about 118 to 128 degrees Fahrenheit, when you do that you are adding body to the beer. Now, I don't know of other alt beers made by other people that undergo proteolytic conversion. Ours does.

YBN: What else?

HD: The next thing is grain composition. Alt beer is supposed to be copper colored. If it's much darker and toastier, it's no longer a real alt beer. If it's much blonder it is more like a kolsch. It is essential in alt beer that you add wheat. If you go by the book, you can add between five to 15 percent wheat. We add about eight. We get our color from Munich malt - the foundation is 2-row. And we're using a little bit of 80-Lovibond crystal malt, just enough to give it a touch of color. You get an enhancement of the bittering of the hops from the wheat. It alters the flavor of the ale.

YBN: And the other elements of the alt?

HD: Yeast is extremely important in alt beer. If you're using a regular British ale yeast...you get the wrong flavor profile. We're using a Wyeast. Through Wyeast, we purchased yeast from the Uerige brewpub in Dusseldorf, Germany. They basically cloned the original Dusseldorf alt yeast and call it German Ale Yeast 1007. Basically, through Wyeast in Oregon, we're using the yeast from the brewpub in Dusseldorf where alt beer originated, so you couldn't be more authentic in your yeast than that.

The water, in my view, water variability in beer is overrated. I think process and other ingredients contribute so much more to beer style and beer flavor. Water is not that crucial unless the water is heavily laden with organic material which gives you a brackish feeling. You don't get that in Ipswich and you don't get that in Portsmouth. The water in Dusseldorf is harder than what you'd get around here. The hardness is probably about double what you get here.

That's where you have to be clever. The harder the water the more the hop bitterness gets accentuated. An alt beer is not overly hoppy, so you have to be careful with your dosage of bittering hops. In our case we have to increase the amount bittering hops over what you would use in Dusseldorf because we have less hard water. But that's the only modification.

Once you understand your variables you can play with them and still produce an authentic product. In terms of bittering hops we use Mount Hood, which is a hybrid of the German Hallertau, which is what you want to use in our beer. Of late, Hallertau has been very uneven in terms of alpha acid ratings. Hallertau is very susceptible to attacks of blight. We find that Mt. Hood, as a Hallertau variety, is heartier and more stable and consistent from one harvest to the next. We find Mt. Hood an adequate and appropriate substitute. As flavor hops, we also use Hallertau in the alt, and for aroma hops we use Tettnanger, also the US variety. I think if anything the American variety (of Tettnanger) is a bit spicier.

YBN: I'm looking at a liter bottle here. Most people have on the bottle somewhere about the beer being made at a neighborhood brewery by the local guys. Not here. I read the name Dornbusch Gold with a lion on it and everything, and I'd think it was from Germany.

HD: That's done deliberately, in a sense, and I know that some people confuse us with an import. That's why on the liter bottles and six-packs we know say right away, 'made in America.'

YBN: You're not pursuing the same marketing strategy of most other microbrewers.

HD: That was done deliberately. Remember, we live in New England and not New Germany. This is an Anglo-Saxon beer culture. When you're the Wachusett brewery you can make a local Country Ale, when you're Ipswich Brewing Company you can produce and Ipswich Ale, or you can produce a Middlesex beer or a Pilgrim Ale. All these things have an Anglo-Saxon connotation.

When you're making a German-style beer...(there isn't) an indigenous German tradition to which you can appeal. Thus, Dornbusch, we chose the name because it's my last name plus it has an obvious German connotation. There's nothing in a German beer which can appeal to a local tradition. So we figured the appeal has to be generic and universal. That's why we picked the design and the name and cutline, if you will, on the label. It's without local reference. The local reference would have been phony. We didn't want to do that.

YBN: What about the lion and the anchor on the label?

HD: That is actually the coat of arms of Dusseldorf. My hometown got its city charter in 1288, so by now the emblem is actually the public domain.

YBN: What's with the Latin inscription (Fruitex Spinosus Rex Verus Cerevisiae) under the lion?

HD: I knew you were going to ask me that.

YBN: (In a sudden epiphany of Latin knowledge) It says something about the king of beers.

HD: Right. Did you know that Budweiser of the Budvar (a Czech brewery) beers used to be the beer of kings? That's what it said on the label because the Austrian court ordered Budvar beer. Other European kings drank Budvar beer. So Budvar, maker of the original Budweiser in Bohemia, was the beer of kings. When Budweiser basically adopted that name, they also twisted the logo and called it the king of beers. Now if Anheuser-Busch makes the king of beers, then Dornbusch makes the true king of beers.

Now, if you say that on your label, surely the ATF would not approve it. So we translated it into Latin. Dornbusch is German for thorn bush. Bush in Latin is fruitex. Thorn is spinosus. What it says is Dornbusch is the true king of beers.