00:00This beer is called Goza, and it was extinct.
00:04For 20 years, nobody on earth made it.
00:06The last barrel went out in March 1966 to a hotel gone two years later.
00:13Bringing it back took two rescues,
00:15and the second only worked because a condemned building was saved.
00:19By the end, you'll know what a style needs to survive.
00:23There's a beer you can order in Chicago or Tokyo.
00:27Pale, cloudy, salty, sour.
00:31Most people who drink Goza think it's new.
00:34It isn't.
00:35In 1824, a master brewer carried the recipe out of Goslar in the Hartz Mountains
00:41and took it a hundred miles east to Leipzig, which made it its own.
00:45By 1900, that city had around 80 bars serving little else.
00:50This was not a rare beer.
00:52It was what you drank after work.
00:54So the question isn't why a rare thing died.
00:58It's how an ordinary one did.
01:01Here's the first part.
01:02Somebody has to be making it.
01:05Every year.
01:06Without a gap.
01:07Then the number making it fell.
01:10Pilsner took the market.
01:11Two wars took the grain.
01:14Not banned.
01:15Not forgotten.
01:16Just fewer places every decade.
01:18By the Second World War, the number was one.
01:22In 1945, that brewery was nationalized and closed.
01:27Four years later, a man who had worked there started again.
01:31Alone.
01:32One small brewery.
01:34One handwritten notebook with the method in it.
01:37The whole style lived in one building and on one piece of paper.
01:441966.
01:45The man who inherited the notebook was working in his garden.
01:49A heart attack.
01:50He died there.
01:52He had not taught it to anyone.
01:55The last barrel went out.
01:57The 31st of March.
01:58Then the notebook was destroyed.
02:01The beer and the instructions for making it ended in the same year.
02:0620 years.
02:08Nobody on earth brewed it.
02:10Here's the second piece.
02:12The method has to survive somewhere.
02:15In 1983, a magazine article about the city's lost Goza bars reached a tavern owner.
02:21He decided to reopen one.
02:24He had no recipe.
02:25So he looked for it in people's memories.
02:28He found drinkers old enough to remember the taste and rebuilt the beer from what they
02:34described.
02:35No brewery in the city would touch it.
02:38So it was brewed 200 kilometers away in East Berlin and shipped in.
02:44May 1986.
02:46It was poured again.
02:48The method had come back with nothing written down.
02:52So why isn't that the end of the story?
02:55Because one tavern is not an industry.
02:58It was brewed under contract, far away, in small runs, for one bar in one city.
03:05The man who brought it back gave up the tavern in 1990.
03:10His brewing venture folded in 1995.
03:13The economics never worked.
03:16Thinning again.
03:17Same shape as before.
03:1920 years later.
03:22Meanwhile, a few kilometers south, something else was dying.
03:26A railway terminus.
03:28Opened in 1842.
03:31Bombed in the war.
03:32The passenger halls were never rebuilt.
03:35Then came the demolition plans, and they stayed for years.
03:39It survived on a technicality.
03:43A monument listing in 1975.
03:46Saved, and then left alone.
03:4925 more years.
03:52Empty.
03:53Two dying things in one city on separate tracks.
03:58Neither knew the other existed.
04:00And here's the third piece.
04:03The one nobody thinks about.
04:05The method existed.
04:07The demand existed.
04:09There was still nowhere in Leipzig to brew it.
04:12What it needed was a building.
04:14Big enough.
04:15Cheap enough.
04:16Desperate enough to say yes.
04:19And then, finally, the two dead things solved each other.
04:24A brewer from the south spent three years on the ruin and rebuilt it.
04:31July 2000.
04:32The station opened as a brewery.
04:35Three links.
04:36The method.
04:37Someone to brew it.
04:39A place to brew it in.
04:40All three broke.
04:43All three came back.
04:45Decades apart.
04:46From strangers.
04:48A style isn't a recipe.
04:50It's a chain.
04:51If you want to understand why so many German regional beers came close to the same ending,
04:58the purity law explains most of it.
05:01That video is right here.
05:03The recipe left Goslar in one man's head in 1824.
05:08Goslar brews it again.
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