Oettinger

Oettinger got huge by refusing to do the things big beer brands do. No television campaigns, no middlemen — the brewery delivers to supermarkets with its own trucks and passes the savings straight to the shelf price. That is how a beer from a small Bavarian town became one of Germany's highest-volume brands.

The town is Oettingen in Bayern, where the brewery's roots go back to 1731. Germans drink Oettinger at home, by the crate, mostly without ceremony — and there is something quietly radical about that. While premium rivals sell mountain springs and monastic legend, Oettinger sells beer as groceries, and Germans have voted for it by the millions of hectoliters: 6.74 million in 2025, keeping it inside the world's top forty brewers.

Snobbery gets you nowhere here. This is decent, cleanly made lager at a price that treats beer as a staple rather than a status symbol — which may be the most German idea of all.

The Pils is pale straw with a quick-fading head: lightly grainy, faintly sweet, with a mild herbal bitterness that does its job and leaves. The Export runs a touch rounder and maltier. Neither will astonish you; both are clean, cold, and exactly what the price on the crate promised.