Krombacher

Krombach is a village in the wooded hills of the Siegerland; Krombacher is one of Germany's best-selling pilsners. The mismatch is the point — a beer big enough to be everywhere in Germany still brews in the small place it is named for.

The brewery dates to 1803 and remains in the hands of the Schadeberg family — the company's full name is still Krombacher Brauerei Bernhard Schadeberg. Its calling card is water: the pils is brewed with Felsquellwasser, soft spring water drawn from the rock of the surrounding hills, a detail repeated so relentlessly in commercials that the word itself became famous in Germany.

Scale never changed the arrangement. Krombacher turned out 5.95 million hectoliters of beer in 2025 — enough for a place in the BarthHaas table of the world's forty biggest brewers, a list otherwise dominated by multinational groups — while remaining independent and family-run, with all of it, still, brewed in Krombach.

A textbook German pils: pale gold under a dense white cap of foam, smelling of cracker and fresh herbs. The malt is lean and bready, the hops grassy and gently bitter, and the soft spring water gives it a rounded, almost silky middle before a clean, dry close.