Ignatz Bier is a boutique artisan craft pilsner, brewed by HomeBase artists, beer lovers, neighbors and social entrepreneurs at the old Engelhardt Brewery located at Thulestrasse 54, Berlin, now home to HomeBase LAB, as a community based project.
Ignatz Bier was created as a tribute bier to the original landlord and director of Engelhardt brewery, Jewish-German business man and philonthropist Ignatz Nacher, as a unique artistic, cultural and social product, carrying our message of interconnectedness in society in a bottle.
The Beer is brewed on site as part of a live, interactive artistic event in a limited edition of 99 bottles – all signed. The Ignatz Bier labels are created as a scroll telling the story of the building, past, present and future.
Last year HomeBase was invited to present the Ignatz Bier project at the prestigious VOLTA 7 art show in Basel, showcasing the first batch of 99 boutique Ignatz Bier bottles. Now Ignatz Bier is arriving to VOLTA NY for its U.S. launch.
Who is Ignatz?
Our beer was named after Herr Ignatz Nacher, the legendary German-Jewish merchant, beer maker, director and main shareholder of the Engelhardt brewery. Nacher transformed the Engelhardt brewery into one of the most successful breweries in Germany before it was taken over in the 1930’s by the Third Reich, in what became one of the biggest cases of Nazi expropriation with major incomes fueling WWII.
After the war the building went through radical shifts turning into a communist brewery, a communist children’s youth hostel, and then after the fall of the Berlin wall it became a deserted space that was empty for almost twenty years before the arrival of the HomeBase project from NYC to transform the space into a not-for-profit artistic and educational home.
Exactly 104 years after Ignatz Nacher launched the first ‘Engelhardt Pilsner’ on site, The HomeBase Project conducted an artistic resurrection of the brewery as both a homage to our legendary landlord and as a way to spread our cultural message of tolerance and interconnectedness in society through the arts.
Ignatz Bier is produced as a boutique beer – each batch includes 99 bottles of bier, and the labels for the bottles are unique one-of-a-kind archival art works created by emerging and established artists on scrolls, accompanied with a text about the story.
The logo of Ignatz Bier is based on the original logo of Engelhardt Brewery, which was transformed over the years from a black haired angel – affiliated with Ignatz Nacher – to a blonde haired angel during the Nazi era. Our artistic incarnation includes the same angel – this time as a whimsical red head.
