Twenty-Five Beers for Your Summer Beer Travels
~The Proverbial So Many Beers, So Little Time~
It’s travel season. Which means you might be looking for some good beers to add to your list.
Remember that Fifty Beers for 2025 list I put together earlier this year? Well, there’s more. I traveled a lot in 2024, so much so that I had trouble narrowing my beer choices down to a neat-and-tidy fifty.
Now that you’ve found a few of those beers on my Fifty Beers for 2025 list, here’s 25 more. If you pair this list with the one I wrote earlier this year and add my Twenty-Five Beers for 2024, you’ll have a grand total of a hundred beers for your beer hunting travels. Not too shabby!
Here’s to finding some of these beers in the wild.
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Accounting for My Tastes in Beer
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Twenty-Five More Beers Worth Your Time in 2025
*Listed in alphabetical order
Adler Bräu (Stettfeld), Altfränkisches Lagerbier. Beautifully hued deep amber and elegant on the palate. Dense bread, hazelnuts, cocoa, and earthy forest floor notes, all balanced by herbal tea and spice.
Allgäuer Brauhaus (Kempten), Urtyp Export. Quite nice for a larger brewing concern that’s part of the Radeberger Gruppe. Country bread drizzled with honey, with zippy pepper-herbal-citrus hops. Same company that brews the Allgäuer Buble line of beers.
Badisch Brauhaus (Karlsruhe), Badisch Dunkel. Not your typical Dunkel. In fact, not like any Dunkel I’ve ever had. If I were to close my eyes, I might guess that it’s an amber-hued beer, but also one that walks and talks like a Kellerbier. An amber Kellerbier? If this is what they mean by “badisch Dunkel,” bring it on! I’d love to drink more of these kinds of beers.
Berliner Berg (Berlin), Berliner Rotes. Rotbier is all the rage these days. It seems to have come out of nowhere, claims about its Franconian lineage notwithstanding. No matter. This one’s as tasty as they come, with just a hint of autumn honey/brown sugar sweetness twinning with spicy Lebkuchen, toffee, hop cologne, toast, and candied almonds. Not as lushly malt-forward as Franconian iterations. The trade-off: It’s a really nice spring and summer sipper!
Big Friendly Atomic Harmony Wild Ale (2023). I love Big Friendly’s lagers, but their farmhouse ales have really won me over lately. This one is fermented in stainless steel with Belgian yeast, then refermented with Brettanomyces. The result: Lush and complex aromas of allspice, French apple cider, chamomile, and honeyed mango swirled together with pineapple. Its cheerful effervescence makes it ideal on a hot Oklahoma summer day.
Bourgogne des Flandres, Lambic Stout. A lambic stout. And a collab with Guinness, no less. (There’s a family history connection behind that collaboration.) I had to try it when I was in Bruges last winter. Black cherry, Lebkuchen, mocha, and Christmas cake lead the way to a pleasant tart cherry note mingling subtle funk and just a hint of roasty bitterness. A nice change of pace.
Brauerei Greif (Forchheim), Schlöberla. Schlöbberla is brewed “nach altfränkischer Brauart.” And that old Franconian brewing heritage really shines in this amber-bronze beer. Dried cherry and hazelnut aromas cascade out of the glass, followed closely by fresh cream and fine caramel, all accented by a mélange of hop aromas ranging from pepper to cinnamon to mint. The beer’s a shape-shifter. And that’s what makes Landbiers so fascinating.
Brauerei Först (Drüggendorf), Premium. Först’s unfiltered “Vollbier vom Lande” exemplifies everything I love about Franconian beer, quirks and all. And especially because of the quirks. This “countryside beer” has all the hallmarks of rustic youth: a light apple and white wine grape note, fresh hay, and a champagne lees character.
Brauerei Kundmüller (Weiher), Schwärzla. Weiherer’s top-fermented ale is their Franconian answer to stout. And it’s a compelling response, with a subtle yeast fruitiness (dark cherry and forest berries), dark chocolate, and a bright African coffee acidity. This is just one of many beers on offer at Kundmüller’s Wirtshaus in the hamlet of Weiher, where traditional Franconian standards meet hopped up craft standards and barrel-aged behemoths.
Brouwerij Verhaeghe, Streuvels. The famed brewers of Duchesse de Bourgogne dub this blonde beer a “poetic beer.” It’s named after Stijn Streuvels, a novelist from nearby Kortrijk who was the first to write in the Flemish idiom. Streuvels started his career as a baker before dedicating himself to chronicling village life in Flanders. He was also a friend of Paul Verhaeghe, who founded his eponymously named brewery in 1885. Brewed for the opening of the Streuvels museum in 2015, the beer lives up to its poetic billing, with an eloquent phrasing of allspice, coriander, ripe banana, and brioche with white raisins. Smooth, dry, and refreshing.
De Cam (Payottenland). If you, like me, have trouble choosing a bottle from a wall of stellar geuze and lambic, here are two suggestions to round out my selection in Fifty Beers for 2025: Perzik (peach) fruit lambic, or Oude Geuze De Cam (2018). Any vintage will do, but this is the one we drank on that cheerful December evening at De Cam.
De Dolle, Stille Nacht (2017). Any trip to Kulminator in Antwerp is a memorable occasion. You’re bound to make friends with random table mates who have made the trek to this legendary taproom and made it past the eccentric owner who keeps the door locked and only lets you pass if you utter the right “password.” And that’s precisely why my notes for this wonderful winter beer are so sparse. I’d rather be talking to my table mates than scribbling down notes. Here are the few that I jotted down while waiting for the bill: dark amber, marzipan, gingerbread, baking spice, marshmallow honey. That gives you an idea of what’s in store with this winter warmer.
Beer Photo Gallery (Click on a thumbnail to enlarge)
The Backstretch
Hoepfner (Karlsruhe), Porter. On the surface of it, a German brewery offering a porter isn’t a huge surprise these days. But when you dig a little deeper, you’ll learn that this large regional brewery made a porter for decades, stopped, and then started again in 1998. Though I prefer British iterations, this beer is an intriguing novelty, one that splits the difference between Schwarzbier and robust porters.
Hopfengut No. 20 (Tettnang), Calista Lager. I was hiking through the Tettnang region during hop harvest and called in at Hopfengut No. 20 for a beer surrounded by shimmering hop fields. What better place to try a lager brewed exclusively with one of Germany’s newer hops? This opalescent beer the colour of sunshine is a change of pace from a straight-up Helles, but not so much that you wouldn’t recognize it as a German lager. Aromas start off spicy and peppery (unsurprising, given that the hop is a descendant of Hallertauer Tradition). And then comes the subtle fruit: tangerine, honeydew melon, pineapple, and lemon grass, all cradled by honeyed malt with a dash of light brown sugar. The perfect beer for the moment.
In de Verzekering tegen de Grote Dorst (Payottenland). Remember that famous beer café I included in Fifty Beers for 2025? I tasted so much goodness on that afternoon in the Payottenland that I can’t just stop at a few of these stellar lambics, geuzes, and krieks. Here are a couple more fine drops worth the trip from Brussels on a Sunday. (What’s a beer traveler’s life without a few extra beers to sweeten the journey?) The lambic from Eylenbosch was impressive enough that I bought a bottle of their geuze a few days later in Bruges. And the kriek from Odilon remains etched in my memory.
Irseeer Klosterbräu (Irsee, Allgäu), Starkbier. I hadn’t heard of Irseer Klosterbräu until recently. Suffice it to say, this is one of those “under the radar” breweries (like Kloster Reutberg) that more of us should know about. All of Irsee’s beers are wonderful, but if you’d like another one that approaches the greatness of their Urtrunk, try the Starkbier, a delightful Maibock.
Kulturbrauerei (Heidelberg), Scheffels Hefeweizen. If you find the mingling of traditional styles and New World hops in Kulturbrauerei’s Kräusen compelling, try Scheffels Hefeweizen with its subtle citrus and orange blossom notes leavening banana custard. The secret: judicious use of Cascade hops.
Lemke (Berlin), Bohemian Pils. Lemke was one of the first breweries in Berlin to dabble in “craft,” but alongside those beers they also brew solid traditional Central European styles, including a fine Hefeweizen and this tasty Bohemian Pilsner. Floral-peppery aromas with notes of fresh hay and a touch citrus lead the way, followed by a light herbal note reminiscent of sage/mint. Crisp and smoothly bitter.
Orca (Nürnberg), Wanderlust (Pale Ale). The craft beer wave may have crested in Germany since the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find plenty of breweries doing their level best to offer an alternative to Germany’s classics. Orca started brewing in 2017. They quickly made a name for themselves with novel beers (like coffee stout or smoked porter with raspberry and habanero) alongside beers that pay tribute to tradition (Weissbier, Kellerbier, Landbier). Wanderlust offers a harmonious balance between these two poles: fruity notes (mango, tangerine, pineapple syrup) tempered by autumn honey and an aperitif-like bitterness.
Põhjala (Estonia), Õhtu Porter. This silky jet-black beer is a chocolate lover’s dream. Chocolate liqueur and milk chocolate mingle with mocha, ganache, toasted toffee, dried dark cherry, anise, and vanilla bean. It’s a fairly straight-up porter (rye, oats, lactose), one that splits the difference between a British porter and an American robust porter, but with a nod to the contemporary trend toward more caramel, more sweetness, more milk chocolate (as opposed to bakers’ chocolate), and none of the acrid roastiness that occasionally mars robust porters.
Schneeeule (Berlin), Minerva. Beyond the core range of Marlene, Kennedy, Irmgard, and Yasmin, Schneeeule has smaller-batch bottlings available at their laid-back taproom in northern Berlin, including the intriguing Minerva (with lavender, juniper berries, ginger, grains of paradise). Quite a beer! Then again, I could say that about all of Schneeeule’s fascinating beers.
Schnitzlbaumer (Traunstein), Schnitzi Weiße. Just a hop, skip, and a jump from Traunstein’s main square, Schnitzlbaumer’s tastefully renovated taproom is worth a side trip if you have the time. I find Schnitzlbaumer’s beers to be somewhat pedestrian, but not their Weissbier. Richly textured, with aromas and flavours of banana custard and a dusting of allspice and nutmeg, it drinks like a Vitus.
Störtebeker (Stralsund). Located way up on the Baltic Sea, Störtebeker brews a wide range of styles, from classic to “craft” to Hansa historical. When I visited last spring, I tasted about ten of their beers. All were excellent, making it difficult to narrow things down to a few beers. Here are two more for your list: Mittsommer Wit (an homage to Belgium), and the delicious Frühlings-Bock (richly honeyed).
Sudden Death (Lübeck), Sandstorm Syndicate India Pale Ale. When you’re confronted with a dizzying array of IPAs in a chill case, how do you choose a beer that’s just right? I did what so many of us do in these situations: I chose the label I liked best — in this case, the one with the Tusken Raider. Sandstorm Syndicate is a turbid terra cotta swirl, not unlike a sandstorm on Tatooine. Tangerine, pineapple, sugared mango, and notes of forest berry and coconut suggest a medley of Citra, Mosaic, and Sabro — gentler beings than the Tusken Raiders. A peppery prickle gives the beer some C3PO-style levity, while the snappy bitterness is a welcome departure from most hazies. Sudden Death hasn’t broken any new ground here, but as with their oodles of American-style IPAs, they do as good a job as the best American brewers.
Vogelbräu (Karlsruhe), Vogel Pils. Vogelbräu is a Hausbrauerei worth seeking out. All of its beers are unfiltered and unpasteurized, which lends them their distinctive richness. Vogelbräu’s taut Pils is a throwback to the days when Jever still brewed smackingly bitter beer. And it’s got pungent hop character to spare, as if you’ve just rubbed a freshly picked hop cone. Peppery orange zest mingles with a beguiling fermentation note of peach and a whiff of sulfur, along with that telltale “Hausbrauerei” note of Sylvaner wine.
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Prost, everyone! I hope you enjoy these beers as much as I did.
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Images by Franz D. Hofer
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