If you’re unsure how American beer is viewed in Germany, ask Sylvia Kopp.

“People in my classes,” said Kopp, who tutors 500 Germans each year at her Berlin Beer Academy, “still think American beer is that fizzy yellow thing.”

Six miles south of Berlin’s landmark Brandenburg Gate, a rebuttal is rising on the site of an abandoned turn-of-the-century gasworks. Escondido’s Stone Brewing, known for full-bodied, aggressively hopped ales that are nothing like Bud or Coors, has come here to build the first U.S.-owned brewery in Europe.

Even for a brewery famous for chutzpah, this is a gamble. Is it wise to invade a nation with an ancient brewing tradition and a fondness for smooth lagers that are the antithesis of Arrogant Bastard Ale?


“For the average German beer drinker,” said Katharina Kurz, manager of the Berlin craft brewery BRLO, “I think the Stone beers are not as accessible.

“It will take some convincing.”

Regardless of what happens in Berlin, San Diego beer is no longer a purely local phenomenon. Since the 1989 founding of Karl Strauss Brewing, the local beer scene came of age simultaneously with the U.S. craft beer movement, both championing complex, fruity, bitter ales with layers of flavor.

San Diego’s takes on traditional styles — from pale ale to India pale ale, stout to porter — won followers and medals. The 2015 Great American Beer Festival, which begins Thursday in Denver, is the country’s largest brewing competition. Locals win so many awards at this annual event that it sometimes seems like a cooler, more mountainous San Diego.


Our county is home to many breweries, 115 at last count, and many talented brewers. San Diego ales are popular across the U.S. — both Green Flash and Stone are building breweries in Virginia to satisfy Eastern consumers — and around the world. From Tokyo to Brussels, craft beer bars stock Ballast Point’s Sculpin IPA, AleSmith’s Speedway Stout and other local favorites.

Having conquered America, Stone Brewing Berlin may look like the inevitable next chapter in the story of San Diego beer. If Stone’s ales sell abroad, why not make them abroad, saving shipping costs and ensuring the beer’s freshness? Yet Germany’s major breweries, staunch critics of German craft beer, are unlikely to welcome these foreigners.

“I think they will all pay Stone a visit,” said Ina Verstl, a Berlin-based industry analyst, “taste the beers and conclude that they are too extreme for German palates.”

Accusations of extremism are only one hurdle before Stone. The location is picturesque, yet a 10-minute walk from the closest train station, a drawback in a city oriented toward public transportation. Winning shelf space and tap handles may be a challenge, as will decoding local attitudes about a pint’s proper price.


Lemke, the city’s oldest craft brewery, sponsored the opening bash for this summer’s Berlin Beer Week. Stone organized the closing party. Tickets to the latter cost 25 euros, about $29, and included 12 samples.

By American standards, that was a bargain.

By German standards? An outrage.

“It’s not because people are poor,” said Oliver “Oli” Lemke, who opened his eponymous brewery in 1999. “It’s because beer is not valued.”


An admirer of Stone’s flamboyant CEO, Greg Koch, Lemke applauds the Southern Californian’s German venture.

Still...

“It may be harder than he thinks it is,” Lemke said.

‘Getting it moving’

Once home to hundreds of breweries, Berlin now has one brewing conglomerate — Berliner Kindl-Schultheis makes a popular Pilsner — and about two dozen small craft breweries. There’s also a major brewing institute, the VLB.


Thomas Tyrell was a VLB brewer when he attended a July 2014 reception at an old gasworks in the Mariendorf neighborhood. The event began with a bang: At the wheel of a forklift, Koch dropped a boulder on a pallet of mass-marketed European and American lagers. After the smashing entrance came a Kennedy-esque speech.

“I look forward to a day in the very near future,” Koch said, “when we at Stone will be able to proudly shout from the rooftops of our German brewery: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner brauer! I am a Berlin brewer!’ ”

“OK,” Tyrell told himself, “that’s something I have to try.”

He introduced himself to Koch, who soon hired Tyrell as Stone Brewing Berlin’s director of brewing operations.


“It was the excitement,” the lanky brewer said, explaining why he quit a secure job for this risky undertaking, “doing a project from the beginning, getting it moving. That’s something you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience.”

The anchor tenant in a quarter-mile-square development, Stone Brewing Berlin has plans for four of the property’s 1901 red brick buildings. They will hold the restaurant and brewery, a packaging facility, company offices, and the occasional private event.

These structures — the largest is the size of an indoor soccer arena, the smallest about as big as a basketball court — have historic designations, so Stone’s plans were filtered through additional layers of German bureaucracy. Yet bulldozers were preparing the brewery’s floor this month, and brewing equipment is due next month.

The place should open by April 2016, with seats for 700 indoors and 500 outdoors, and three house beers: Arrogant Bastard, Ruination and Stone IPA.


“This is a very exciting thing,” said the Berlin Beer Academy’s Kopp, “but the Germans are all suspicious: ‘What are they going to do?’ But I think this will be very positive.”

Lemke is enthusiastic, too, noting that Stone’s marketing expertise is lacking among his German peers.

“Stone can be very successful here,” he said. “They know what they are doing.”

Yet he wonders about that southern Berlin location which, like Stone’s bistros in Escondido and Point Loma, is far from the city center.


“In America, everybody drives so there it doesn’t matter if you have to drive to a brewery,” Lemke said. “Here, nobody drives if they are going out to drink beer.

“I don’t know how you get all these people here, attract them to come up here every day.”

On the day it opens, Stone Brewing Berlin will be Berlin’s largest craft brewery. It intends to be — and may need to be, to survive — a must-see destination.

Biggest hurdle

This city of 3.5 million is awash in beer. Many streets are lined with signs plugging beer — Jever, Berliner Pilsner, Prater Pils. In summer, people flock to outdoor beer gardens.


But the signs tout mass-produced beers, and the gardens are sponsored by major breweries.

Less than a mile from Stone Brewing Berlin is a barnlike Getränke Hoffmann shop, something like a Beverages & More! outlet — if BevMo! was owned by a brewing conglomerate and only carried its own products. German supermarkets don’t sell craft beer, and brewers like Lemke can only cite a handful of places where their products are available.

“It’s harder over here to get your beers on the shelf,” he said.

Verstl agreed: “I think distribution will be Stone’s biggest hurdle. Most bars here in Europe are tied to breweries. That means they are hard to get into unless Stone has a secret deal with Heineken, AB InBev or Carlsberg.”


In Berlin’s small network of craft beer bars, though, Stone is already a known — and popular — commodity.

“People come in and ask for Stone,” said Adrian Sampson, the owner of Monterey Bar in the hip Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. “They have a pretty good line. Go-To (Stone’s session IPA) probably sells the best here.”

On a recent night in Salt N Bone, a fashionable restaurant near the Monterey Bar, a Stone Brewing Berlin employee was warmly greeted by a table of American expats.

Daniel Copeman, the British bar manager, was not surprised: “When we have Stone on, it sells better than anything else.”


Even though Stone may siphon off some of his own customers, “Oli” Lemke hopes Arrogant Bastard and its cohorts take Berlin by storm.

“The German public is far from understanding what we are doing in craft beer,” he said. “Anybody who takes part in this will push the whole idea forward, so I am grateful.”