Waking a sleeping giant

摘要

Not only was dortmunder export the favourite beer style among the people in Dortmund and the Ruhr area, a major region of the German Wirtschaftswunder, it was the most popular beer type in all of beer-loving Germany. After WW2 and up to the early 1970s dortmunder export was the favourite beer style in Germany. In 1968, the 100-years anniversary of the iconic brewery DAB (Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei), 57 percent of all beer sold in Germany was dortmunder export. The second most popular beer style at that time was pilsner with only 19 percent of the market. Shortly thereafter an unprecedented decline in popularity of the beer style happened. The big ads for Brinkhoff's No1 at the Sudtribune at Signal Iduna Park, the impressive stadium for the football club Borussia Dortmund with 81,365 seats, is a sad testimony of the decline. The master brewer Fritz Brinkhoff was one of the masterminds behind the success and development of the dortmunder export style - known as dortmunder or just dort. The commercial for Brinkhoff's No1 at Signal Iduna Park was not an ad for a dortmunder export but a new pilsner.