the old and the new...
SUN BREW Brewery sits atop one of Oberfranken’s highest and least polluted mountain ranges. It is blessed with constant access to pure, non-calcified water that doesn’t need to be chemically processed or treated before use.
The Sonnenbräu Lichtenberg Brewery originally emerged out of a so-called community Brew-house, which was in the aptly named Brauhausgasse (Brew-house Alley). This consisted of different brew houses in Sonnenberg dating back to the 14th through 16th centuries. The beer that was produced there was then lagered (stored) in the various cavernous cellars located in the cliffs in the town of Lichtenberg. Property or home ownership and civil rights were prerequisites for brewing and packaging licenses.
In 1904, sixty-five local “brewing families” merged, creating “Sonnenbrau Lichenberg on the current SUN BREW Brewery site.
a peek through the window of the new brewery
new beers - old traditions
Through the summer months, the beer was kept cold by tunneling the cold air of the ice room through the lagering cellars.
The brewery thrived until WWII, after which it never really quite regained its footing and was on the verge of closing it's doors for good -- that is until 2016 when Sonnenbräu was purchased by the newly founded SUN BREW GmbH. SUN BREW is owned by two young German entrepreneurs in partnership with their masterful brewer J. Daniel Carter.
And the rest is brewing history in the making.
... in Dan's words
The first time I saw the brewery I was both appalled and astounded. Appalled, because I had never seen such a run-down brewery, with the signs and smells of years of neglect. It was like the previous brewer brewed his last batch of beer, dropped everything, turned off the power and simply left.
The brewery, over its hundred plus years of existence not only possessed a classic copper-clod brewhouse, but hundreds of hectoliters worth of lager tanks. The workshop has every tool imaginable needed to repair, maintain and even build anything a brewery needs.
But the entire brewery was built and expanded over time, so the building´s schematic is chaotic and set up to produce beer in a very old fashioned manner, including the use of a cool-ship to chill the beer. This is not safe from a sanitary standpoint. A couple other design features did not suit me either: methods of transferring the hot wort from vessel to vessel, which oxidized it more than I find comfortable. So we re-configured much of the piping to produce a cleaner product before firing up a first batch of beer.
the first day was a catastrophe
When, after many pre-run tests with water, there was no hot water with which to sparge, I literally stood there and thought, “well, it was a nice thought. What a shame to have to dump the whole thing.” But then, as would become typical for this new-old brewery, we hooked up a long hose and brought hot water to the brewhouse, where it was needed, and I literally held the hot-water hose in my hands and tried as best I could to spray hot water over the mash to wash out the valuable malt-sugars.
As it were, though, I brewed only a partial batch, as I assumed Murphy´s Law would rule. So, blended with a second, which went better, this became our first beer: the "Amberle" amber ale.
