Trumer Offers Imported Flavor with Local Freshness

Trumer Brauerei, on 4th Street in Berkeley, is one of the most unique breweries I have ever visited.

Our favorite photographer Loren Earle-Cruickshanks took this photo of Master Brewer Lars Larson for a past Trumer Pils ad campaign.

By Joel Williams
Published: September, 2008 

Its uniqueness, however, stems from something it doesn’t do—that is, it doesn’t make more than one style of beer. The entire brewery, and it’s a big one, is set up to make the flagship Trumer Pils, and that’s it!

Maybe we should go back a little bit in time to explain. (By a little bit, I mean over 400 years.) The original Trumer Brauerei, located in Salzburg, Austria, was started in 1601 and became known as an exceptional local brewery throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since the introduction of the Pilsner style in the mid-19^th century, the Austrian brewery concentrated on perfecting that style. Today, its reputation is well-known throughout Europe for its artfully crafted Pilsner beer.

Trumer wanted to introduce a true European Pilsner in the States, but knew that, in order to do so, the beer would need to be made here. It is well accepted in the brewing community that imported, pasteurized versions of European beers never live up to the true flavor of the originals. During Trumer’s search for the perfect location in the United States, it came upon the former Golden Pacific Brewery in Berkeley. Both the location of the Bay Area, with its very sophisticated and knowledgeable beer drinking community, and the fact that the local water supply is nearly identical to the water in Salsburg made the Berkeley location ideal.

After extensive renovations and expansion to the existing facility, Trumer imported all of the raw materials that the company uses at the Austrian brewery and began creating the local version of Trumer Pils in 2004. The result is a very clean, crisp, delicately balanced and fresh traditional Pilsner beer that is brewed locally. Trumer was actually the first Brewery outside of Germany to win the Gold Medal for a German Style Pilsner at the World Beer Cup Awards in 2006—a feat that the brewery repeated again this year.

Because the goal was to create a true Pilsner in the states, Trumer has no desire at this time to produce other beer styles—not even a light version—and I praise that decision. It would be easy to pound out a couple of more styles to cater to other tastes, but that’s not what Trumer is about. All they want to do is to produce and distribute the best traditional Pilsner beer stateside, and they have the awards to prove that they are on the right track.

Not only does Trumer import all of the traditional ingredients from Europe, the company even made sure that it hired a German-trained Master Brewer. Lars Larson is originally from Portland and has over 20 years of brewing experience in breweries of all sizes. He also speaks fluent German and received his formal brewing education in Berlin, Germany. After brewing in Argentina for a while, and after a short stint at Stroh’s Brewery in Texas, Larson was eventually hired as the Brewmaster for the new Trumer project in the U.S.

When I asked Larson about only making one style of beer he told me, We feel we have barely tapped our potential with what the Pils can do. So right now we really want to just focus on the Pils. Trummer Pils can be currently found on tap and in stores throughout the Bay Area.