Ah, Berlin, this amazing, sprawling city with its rich and often dark history. In the recent past it was home to Bohemians and expats living on the cheap, but it’s become a victim of its own success and now rents have, if the Italian part-time animator and Uber driver I spoke to is correct, tripled in the last few years.

Those cheap rents made it the heart of the nascent and still small craft beer movement in Germany. They now also probably mean new entrants will choose other cities like Hamburg, instead. (A young couple told me Hamburg is starting to rock. Well, they were from Hamburg, and bar chat isn’t always perfectly reliable, but I buy it.) I’m going to do a bit of a cheat here and offer two beers. I have mightily resisted this temptation for most of this post, but here it can’t be helped.

I came to Berlin for two reasons: 1) to see what the revivalists were doing with Berliner weisse, and 2) to see what Berlin craft beer was like and see if I could find a passable IPA. My sample size is small, but to date I have not encountered a single one. In Berlin I found both, and there’s no way I’m choosing from between them.

First, Schneeeule, which is not a comedy name but an actual word—it means snowy owl. Schneeeule is the project of Ulrike Genz, or “Ule,” which is also spelled out at the end of the name. She makes only soured beer, and most of it Berliner weisse. (I also tried a fun dark beer that was a nice change of pace.) She makes these beers properly, with Brettanomyces originally harvested from an old bottle of Berliner weisse (and not, apparently, Schultheiss, the last extant maker). She makes variations on the base beer, with additions of blossoms or other flavors. I didn’t get to meet her—she was in the US—but her husband Peter Schnitz walked me through a tasting of five of her beers. Among these, I’ll go with Schneeeule Marlene, then, named after Dietrich, and their standard Berliner weisse. These beers are famously made to age in the bottle, and the one we tried was ten months old. The Brett was immediately evident on the nose, but subtle in the beer. Instead, a strong peach ester predominated, one that evolved toward white wine. The peach note is a characteristic of their Brett, it seems—I found it in all the beers. The wheat was largely gone, but there was still a general sense of malt. Complex, dry, and not not super sour. I also tried Lemke’s, another proper Berliner weisse, but Schneeeule’s was more complex.

Ulrike and Peter are old punk rockers, and they bring that ethos to this brewery—uncompromising, willing to be small while making a niche product. Peter told me, “It’s an important part of our [mission]—to give Berlin some of its history and culture back.” Very cool brewery.