Beer trail 12 · Berlin, Germany
What The Building Was Before
An army laundry, a boiler house, a railway yard, and a brewery inside a brewery.
- Distance
- ≈ 30 km across the city
- Driving
- All five reachable on the U- and S-Bahn · a full day
- Stops
- 5 breweries
A west-to-east crossing of Berlin through five breweries, none of which occupy a building put up for brewing — a garrison laundry, a Kesselhaus, a railway repair works, a stack of shipping containers, and the shell of a far larger brewery that closed.
Best travelled May – September for the beer gardens; the taprooms are year-round
The history
Berlin has more empty buildings than most cities have buildings
Almost nothing in brewing is built for brewing. This archive keeps finding it — a Quonset hut in Calgary, loading bays in the Barley Belt, a railway station in Düsseldorf — but Berlin does it more thoroughly than anywhere else, because Berlin has more disused industrial and military fabric than almost any city in Europe.
A century of being built up, bombed, divided, walled and abandoned in sections left the city full of structures with no remaining purpose. Rail yards nobody dispatched from. Barracks with no garrison. Factory halls on the wrong side of a border.
Brewers took them for the same reason brewers always take cheap industrial space: high ceilings, heavy floors, drainage, a wide door. The buildings on this route were built for laundry, for steam, for locomotive repair, for freight — and one of them for brewing at a scale that no longer exists.
Each stop here is named for what the building used to be, because in every case that is the more interesting half of the story.
The route
Five buildings, west to east
Start in the far west — Spandau is nearly its own town
Brauhaus Spandau
Spandau · Berlin
A house brewery in a former garrison army-laundry building, out at the western edge of the city.
What it was beforeSpandau was a fortress and garrison town long before it was a Berlin borough. Somebody had to wash the uniforms; this is the building where they did it.
East into Wedding
Vagabund Brauerei
Wedding · Berlin
Founded 2011 by a group who started homebrewing, and now operating out of the Vagabund Kesselhaus.
What it was beforeA Kesselhaus is a boiler house — the building that made steam for everything around it. Now it makes beer, which also needs a great deal of hot water.
South into the centre, on old railway ground
BRLO
Gleisdreieck · Berlin
The one that did not find a building — it built one, stacking its brewhouse and beer garden out of shipping containers on former railway land.
What it was beforeGleisdreieck was a rail triangle, then wasteland, then a park. Containers are the honest answer to a site like that: reversible, and cheap enough to risk.
South-east into Neukölln
Privatbrauerei am Rollberg
Neukölln · Berlin
The strangest reuse on the route: a small independent brewery operating inside the former Kindl brewery complex.
What it was beforeBerliner Kindl brewed here at industrial scale and left. A brewery in a brewery is not really reuse — it is a smaller thing moving into the shell of the larger thing that replaced it and then went away.
Finish east at the RAW Gelände
Privatbrauerei Schalander
RAW Gelände, Friedrichshain · Berlin
A house brewery on the RAW Gelände, brewing in Friedrichshain since 2009.
What it was beforeRAW stands for Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk — the national railway's repair works. Locomotives were rebuilt here. A schalander, fittingly, is the room where brewery workers took their break.
What this page does not knowThe building histories are as recorded on each brewery's archive entry, which in most cases comes from the brewery's own account or Berlin's tourism directory rather than from a heritage survey. Brauhaus Spandau's founding year is not established. Distances are rough: these five span most of the width of Berlin, so treat this as a transit route rather than a walk.
Tally's Take
Why the buildings outlast the businesses
A brewery is a tenant. The building is the landlord, and the landlord usually wins.
Every stop on this route is a business that exists because a structure was standing empty and cheap. None of them commissioned a building; all of them inherited one, and the inheritance shaped what they became — Vagabund is the size of a Kesselhaus, BRLO is the shape of the containers it could afford, Schalander fits the bay it was given.
Rollberg is the one that should give a brewer pause. Berliner Kindl was enormous, and enormous was not enough. A small independent now brews in the space it vacated, which is either the most encouraging or the most sobering fact on the route depending on the day you visit.
This is also why the archive bothers recording closed breweries at all. Without Kindl's record, Rollberg is just a brewery in Neukölln. With it, the address is an argument about scale.
This page is the story; the passport is the journey. Open the route there to track how much of it you have actually done.
Follow this route in your passport →Guided
Tours on this route
Nobody runs a guided version of this route yet, so it is self-drive.
If you run shuttles, guided tours or designated-driver trips in Calgary, this route is open. We list real, bookable tours here with your booking link — and never a placeholder for one that doesn't exist.
Run a tour on this route →Drink responsiblyThirty kilometres across Berlin is a U-Bahn and S-Bahn day, not a driving one — which is the correct way to do it anyway. Nobody should be driving this route at all.
What The Building Was Before is open for anchor stops.
Breweries on the route get a full archive profile, a scannable code, and a place in the itinerary. Tourism boards get a packaged route with the traffic tracked end to end.