Looking for Leverkusen

On my first trip to Germany back in 2009, I spent a few days going round brewpubs in the Rhineland, some of which became favourite drinking spots that I would revisit numerous times in the following years. Catching a train from Düsseldorf to Cologne which passed through a rather anonymous looking town about halfway between them, I was surprised to see on a platform going past the carriage window a station sign for Leverkusen.

Like most non-Germans I suspect, I'd only heard of the place because of its football club Bayer Leverkusen, who won their first ever Bundesliga title this weekend, and had lazily assumed that it was somewhere in Bavaria (Bayer does mean someone from Bavaria, but is also a fairly common German surname, like London, York or Kent in English I suppose, and was that of the founder of the pharmaceutical company which owns the club,  who came from the nearby industrial town of Barmen, birthplace of fellow factory owner Friedrich Engels of Salford and Communist fame, which is now part of the linear city of Wuppertal that I would visit on a subsequent trip to the Rhineland).

Bayer Leverkusen are apparently not well liked in the rest of Germany, partly because of their corporate ownership in a country where at least a degree of fan control is the norm through membership schemes which give matchgoers a voice at board level. That seems a bit harsh given that they have played in the same town since their foundation as a works team sponsored by the company in 1904 and are not a recent creation for publicity purposes or part of a franchise chain like another Bundesliga club, RB Leipzig.

Bayer Leverkusen manager Xabi Alonso celebrated the title win with a large glass of Bitburger, a mass market Pils that you see on sale throughout the Rhineland.

Dunkles for Goal Prosts

The Foreign Office warning before this summer's Euro 2024 football tournament that beer in Germany is stronger on average than it is here got me thinking about the different varieties that the fans heading there will be able to enjoy. Looking at the ten cities hosting matches, six give their name to distinctive beer styles: Berliner Weisse, Dortmunder Export, Düsseldorfer Altbier, Kölsch from Cologne (Köln), Leipziger Gose, and Münchener Helles and Dunkles (not to mention pale and dark Bock, Märzen and Weißbier). Away from the more touristy parts of the Rhineland and Bavaria, it's not that far to either Franconia to sample a smoked Bamberger Rauchbier or Thuringia (where England will have their training camp) for some stout-like Schwarzbier.

Germany is obviously a bigger country than Britain, and has a much more recent history of being divided into separate states, both before unification in 1871 and the reunification of East and West in 1990, but still seems to have a much more regional beer market than us. It's no doubt a product of local chauvinism as well as for historical reasons (I can still see the look of disdain when I told the regulars in a Düsseldorf pub that I'd not only been to Cologne but had drunk Kölsch there), but even with the most popular type of beer, Pils, there doesn't seem to be a national brand that leads the market like Carling does here, and relatively large areas of the country, especially in the South, where it hasn't become the dominant style (the only other place in the world I can think of where that's still the case is Ireland).