From a takeover in the Harz to a national launch in 1979.

Clausthaler is a German alcohol-free beer created by the Binding-Brauerei of Frankfurt am Main. Binding itself is much older: German Wikipedia, citing the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says the cooper and brewer Conrad Binding bought the small Glock brewery in Frankfurt’s old town on 1 August 1870, and the company later built its main brewery on the Sachsenhausen hill. German Wikipedia dates Binding’s place in the Oetker group to 1952; English Wikipedia gives 1953.

The name points north, to the Harz. During the 1960s and 1970s Binding bought a string of smaller breweries in Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and northern Baden and closed most of them, and English Wikipedia says two of these purchases survive as brand names, Clausthaler and Schöfferhofer. German Wikipedia lists the Städtische Brauerei Clausthal, closed in 1978, among those takeovers, and says the Clausthaler brand comes from one of these late acquisitions.

The beer’s national launch came in 1979. A dpa report carried by the Deutsche Handwerks-Zeitung in March 2019 said that the Frankfurt brewery had then been a “lonely pioneer,” and that a heavily advertised, nationwide beer brand without alcohol was something entirely new in West Germany in 1979; the same report noted that East Germany had already had an “Autofahrerbier,” the Aubi, for some years. A later dpa report, printed in the Berliner Zeitung in July 2023, again called 1979, the year of Clausthaler’s national introduction, a landmark year for alcohol-free beer in Germany.

The company tells the story in more detail. Clausthaler says it introduced what it calls controlled fermentation in 1973, and that in 1979 it first presented the beer to bar owners and retailers as a “Prinzenbier,” a new light beer, before revealing that it was alcohol-free. The 2019 dpa report described the once-patented process as one in which fermentation is stopped relatively early, once the alcohol content still permitted by law, 0.5 per cent, is reached.

A coat of arms, a brew kettle and a red word.

For most of its life Clausthaler wore an ornate badge. When the brand was redesigned for its 40th anniversary, the trade magazine Horizont described the old look in January 2019 as a heavy, gold-edged frame around the lettering and an almost baroque red-and-gold coat of arms with a brew kettle. Both were retired. The new signet, Horizont reported, was clearer and more reduced, and it put one element first: a red “Alkoholfrei”. The brand’s marketing head told the magazine that the emphasis was deliberate, because Clausthaler sells only alcohol-free varieties, and that the brew kettle stayed as a symbol of brewing craft.

The same redesign gave each of the four German varieties, Original, Extra Herb, Radler and Naturtrüb, a new, brighter colour so that they could be told apart on the shelf. Horizont credited the work to the agency DFM – Brand Builders of Bad Homburg, with a launch spot by Ogilvy Frankfurt.

Advertising has long carried the brand as much as the label. Horizont recalled in June 2017 two earlier lines, “Nicht immer, aber immer öfter” (not always, but more and more often) and “Kann ja mal vorkommen” (it can happen), when it reported the launch of a new campaign under the claim “Erfrischend nüchtern,” eight TV spots created by the agency Blood Actvertising. The company says its 1980s advertising drew on the James Bond films and that the slogan “Alles, was ein Bier braucht” (everything a beer needs) dates from 1986.

Abroad the brand has worn a different face. Clausthaler says it introduced a new international look in 2018 with the claim “Taste Full Life,” while the German range received its new design in 2019, and the company says the packaging was modernised again in 2024.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mixer and alcohol-free names: Canada Dry, Q Mixers, Thomas Henry, Franklin & Sons, London Essence, Double Dutch and Clausthaler. Mixer and alcohol-free brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A mixer or alcohol-free brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the promise it makes, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Frankfurt name, now brewed in Dortmund.

Clausthaler now belongs to the Radeberger Group, the beer business of the Oetker family group of Bielefeld, as the 2023 dpa report put it. German Wikipedia says Binding-Brauerei AG has traded as the Radeberger Group since 2002; the group also owns the Saxon brewery behind Radeberger, and the wider family group includes the food brand Dr. Oetker.

Where the beer is brewed changed recently. The Radeberger Group announced on 29 September 2022 that it would close the Binding brewery in Frankfurt, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported, and production and bottling there ended step by step by 21 September 2023. Since then, according to German Wikipedia citing the FAZ, Clausthaler and Schöfferhofer have been brewed and bottled at the Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei in Dortmund, another group brewery, while Binding beer moved to Tucher in Fürth. The Binding company remains in Frankfurt as a sales and administration business that holds the brand rights, and the group’s head office stayed in Sachsenhausen.

The range has grown in steps. The company says Extra Herb joined in 1995, a Radler with lemonade in 2001, an amber dry-hopped beer for the United States in 2015, the cloudy Naturtrüb in Germany in 2018, and a grapefruit version and a seasonal winter beer called Santa Clausthaler abroad in 2020. Clausthaler says it was sold in more than 50 countries by 1989.

The name needs a little care online. Clausthal is a town in the Harz, now part of Clausthal-Zellerfeld and home to a technical university, neither connected with the beer today; the brand’s own site is clausthaler.de.

For a design guide, Clausthaler shows how a beer brand built on what it leaves out can move from an ornate red-and-gold crest to a plain red word, and keep one object, the brew kettle, as its link to brewing. Compare Radeberger, its sister brand in the same group, and Erdinger, the Bavarian wheat-beer brewery. For this guide we use Alkoholfrei red, crest gold and malt cream with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Clausthaler’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.