The dark brown grains that Markus Berberich hands around taste similar to coffee beans.

"This is roasted malt," he says.

"When this is brewed with oat malt in the beer, it tastes like an espresso-chocolate cream." In the malt warehouse of the Rügen Insel brewery, white sacks are stacked with other varieties - barley malt, oat malt or caramelized rye malt, which is said to taste like biscuit in the beer.

The brewery uses around thirty types of malt, as well as about the same number of types of hops and around sixty different yeasts – two per type of beer.

"A normal brewery has one or maybe two yeasts," says the founder of the brewery.

"Our piano has many more keys."

Twenty types of beer are created in the brewery in the small community of Rambin on the island of Rügen.

There are also ten occasion-related styles, such as beers with chocolate around Christmas.

The brewery summarizes the different types under the term "rare beers": This includes beer styles from other countries that are hardly known in this country, and self-created or interpreted beer types - from the traditional farm worker beer from Belgium to beers with pine needles or sea salt .

This is what makes the brewery stand out, says Berberich: "We have formed our own product category and are also perceived as such."

"Beer brewing has become more and more rationalized"

The Saarlander opened the brewery in 2015 after working for 17 years as managing director of the Störtebeker brewery in neighboring Stralsund.

At that time there was movement in the German beer market, where the prices are particularly low in international comparison.

"There was an international beer revolution that didn't happen in Germany," the 53-year-old recalls.

In countries like Denmark, Italy or the USA, the need for more beer and flavor variety has arisen.

Many home brewers soon opened successful craft breweries.

“At some point these international brands pushed their way into Germany – at new price points that we didn’t know here.” The new styles found consumers willing to buy.

"That's when we said: Come on, let's do it ourselves."

The entrepreneur was successful with this: the Insel brewery has been in the black since it opened, and in 2021 it turned over around seven million euros.

The company now employs around 30 people and sells around 3.5 to 4 million bottles of beer a year.

It also stands out on the market with an elaborate brewing method that Berberich says is unique.

He developed it together with two experienced master brewers from Belgium and the United States.

"Beer brewing has been rationalized more and more over the past few decades in order to make beer production cheaper and to keep the beer price low," says Berberich.

As a result, the "television advertising beers" have become increasingly similar in taste.

"The beer matures in the bottle like champagne"

Berberich and his colleagues were inspired by traditional brewing methods.

He received financial support from two members of the Dutch brewing family de Groen, who took part as investors.

"If something made the beer taste-intensive fifty or a hundred years ago, then we did it with new machines," says the founder, pointing to the equipment that can be seen clearly from the bar in the sales room.

"Normal breweries cannot reproduce what we do here in terms of process technology."