ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a transnational cultural and business history of Löwenbräu beer in the two decades after the Second World War. It contends that in the process of economic growth and expansion, tastemakers in West Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom constructed and developed a marketable and exclusive sense of authenticity around Löwenbräu beer. It demonstrates how brewers, lawyers, marketers, distributors and politicians across borders and cultures generated and regulated knowledge about a product. Selling the beer meant selling the rhetoric of the traditional, almost ahistorical practices of production in Bavaria, the heart of German brewing. It also meant selling the legitimacy of a particular mode of consumption, rooted in Bavaria but communicated across borders as broadly German. More than selling beer, producers, marketers, distributors and legislators sold an idea of real German beer and what it meant to drink it like a real German. By the mid-1960s this knowledge-making reached the highest political levels of the Cold War. The notion of West Germany as a fun-loving nation of beer drinkers entered into a much larger reconceptualisation of the country away from a wartime enemy and towards an unthreatening ally in the cold war capitalist west.
