A brewer from Alsace in Barcelona
August Kuentzmann Damm came from a family of brewers in Alsace. In the 1870s he moved to Barcelona and in 1876 started to brew there, in the same decade that Bavarian-style lager was spreading across Europe. The company he founded still carries his name.
Barcelona was an industrial city, growing quickly and building new districts. Bars and cafés expanded with it, and the demand for a cold, clean drink for working people and for the city's expanding middle class was real. Damm's lager fitted. The company later built a large brewery in the Eixample, the planned district of grid streets that was being laid out in the same years.
Estrella
The company's best-known beer carries a star, estrella, in its name. It is a pale lager of the Bavarian type, light in body and moderate in bitterness, designed to be served very cold in a hot city. Over the twentieth century it became closely tied to Barcelona and to Catalonia, and it is widely served in the city's bars.
The story is a small example of how brewing travelled. Skilled immigrants brought the methods of one region to another and adapted them to local water, climate and taste. We describe the same process in our article on lager yeast.