BREWING ANGER: BERLIN BEER STRIKE OF 1932
Today in Berlin: 25 February, 1932
Every nation has its symbols, those official and those that everyone knows. Especially culinary ones. For France it must be the baguette, for Italy pasta, for Scots their supreme whisky and Germany stands for beer.
But the latest news from the Federal Office for Statistics is grim at worst and unsettling at best: German beer consumption has fallen again! By a whopping 30% between 1993 and 2025. Only between 2024 and 2025 Germany’s collective passion for flüßiges Brot (“liquid bread”) cooled down by 6%. If that sounds negligible, here are the actual numbers: it is a minus of 7.8 billion litres of beer that would have been brewed, sold and gulped down on those sunny evenings in August.
In Berlin these numbers are even more alarming: Berlin and Brandenburg reduced their beer consumption by 11.8%. Considering how many empty bottles of beer you will encounter on the U7 or S3 trains on any given day, this feels pretty counterintuitive but statistics don’t lie: in 2025 both sister-states downed a billion of those bottles fewer than a year before. That is twelve bottles per head.
If Berlin were a patient and Berlin's beer consumption habits were one of its vital functions monitored since 1900, then by the end of 2025 that patient would have been on a drip. But still responsive.
At the beginning of 1932, however, the patient suffered a complete collapse.
Not because Berliners had lost interest in their Helles (lager) but because on 25 February 1932 the Berliner Bierstreik (Berlin Beer Strike) began…