The brewery frontage
on the Schnellerstrasse would appear to have been the original offices
together with a large dwelling house, probably that of the family who
built the brewery back in 1882, though what it became subsequently is not
clear.
The office building did not change from its original purpose and it is clear that that is what it remained right up to the time of closure, ample evidence lying around literally everywhere. There is even a large printer rotting away in one room and an enormous safe. It was interesting to find two ledgers hand written in immaculate Germanic script though our knowledge of the language was insufficient for us to be able to understand much of what we were looking at. With the price of scrap metal, especially copper, so high it goes without saying that practically the entire brewery has been stripped of it's equipment, the only real exceptions being in the control room of the "Maschinenhaus" and on the upper floors of a huge five story building which we think is the bottling plant. This otherwise plain and rather austere red brick building has a seven story tower built on one side with an observation platform at the top. It's intended purpose is not at all obvious but it is well worth the effort of getting up there for the extensive views it affords, especially over the River Spree which borders the northern edge of the site.
There is a lot of street art at the Bärenquell Brauerei, much of it the inevitable tedious tagging. Some though is exceptionally talented and well executed work, none more so than a frieze on a bedroom wall in the house at the front of the site. This is highly unusual in so much as it has been created entirely by the careful application of black electrical tape to the wall paper on the wall. The scene depicted is of helmeted figures from a bygone age piloting a sailing boat. The brewery seems to attract a lot of graf artists - in truth graffiti is extremely prevalent around Berlin and practically every bit of vertical wall everywhere is adorned with spray paint, including sadly many of the beautiful buildings. We think we disturbed some teenaged taggers on the top floor of the bottling plant. I spoke to the guy who was clearly the leader and he informed me he was from California, and showing his local friends around the place. But the fact that he clearly had no idea what urb-ex is kind of pointed to him being there for a different purpose. I wonder why he feels the need to come all the way from the USA to deface walls? But like it or loath it street art (as apposed to moronic tagging) can be very aesthetic and you will see many examples of what we found in the photos we took around the brewery... The pix...
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The
Berlin city mascot is a bear, usually a bright red one, and Bärenquell
translates as "the spring of the bears"! In 1882 building of the brewery
by a local family began at the current location and it was named the
Borussia Brauerei. It was extended progressively over the years, for
example, the office block was built six years later in 1888. In 1898 the
now thriving business was sold to Schultheiss AG and expanded greatly. Two
world wars later it was still going but a great part of Berlin fell into
the Russian sphere of influence and the brewery came under state control
in the same way that practically every business did at that time in the
DDR. It was renamed the VEB Bärenquell - VEB stands for Volkseigener
Betrieb, meaning an enterprise owned by the people and run by the people.
Bärenquell was so popular that it became one of the big four Berlin
brewers along with Kindl, Berliner Pilsener and Schultheiss.
After the fall of the wall and the
reunification of Germany the people, tired of
years of DDR only products, began to buy
imported foreign beers simply because they could and because they were
fashionable. Inevitably the massive fall in sales of Bärenquell's beers
hit hard and sustaining the huge brewery and workforce in the face of such
a slump in sales brought the company to it's knees. The Bärenquell
Brauerei closed its doors for the last time on April 1st, 1994, after 112
years of brewing in Berlin. 
Over
the Christmas holidays of 2011 we went back to Berlin for a few days and
we visited the brewery on Boxing day. We "cased the joint" carefully
first, as we always do, looking for a discrete entry point.
Eventually we found one and we climbed
in over a low window ledge where someone had conveniently left an empty
beer crate as a step up! Once inside we began
a cautious explore only to find the place was like Piccadilly Circus in
the rush hour - there was even a family out for a stroll around the
site! We relaxed considerably then and had a most enjoyable explore as a
result! 
Suffice
it to say that it's use appears to have remained that of domestic
accommodation because there are still several bathrooms and rooms on the
first floor with wallpaper of a type normally found in a bedroom.
There is also a large lounge
adjacent to one of the bedrooms with a solid fuel burner of a type common
in Germany, Slovakia, and Austria, situated by the door. 
The
first building we entered after gaining access to the site has a really
tall, narrow hall with a spiral staircase climbing in stages to the
ceiling several floors up. Quite what this was for we couldn't work out,
even after I had climbed to the top of the stairs and looked at the hall
from a different view point. As the stairs climb there are small platforms
at several levels as though there had been inspection or access points at
different heights. Perhaps a very tall lagering vessel was situated here
though somehow I have my doubts - anyway up, it provided a great photo
opportunity. The same building has a really jerry built office (pardon the
pun!) constructed of cheap chip board so typical of the DDR period. In the
same area a flight of steps lead down into a partially flooded cellar.
Upon inspection we found four or five mattresses there with cheap personal
belongings laid out upon them but Harry Ramp's German cousins from the
Heinrich Ramp family were not at home. We also stumbled across a narrow
room within the bottling plant which had a couch and chairs, and candles
in bottles, all tidied and cleaned up to provide a really quite
presentable habitation for more Heinrichs, again though they were not at
home. The fact that the cellar "rampery" was flooded is perhaps why they
moved house. I just thank the Lord that there was no appalling smell
redolent of dead bodies like in the Kinderkrankenhaus tramp's quarters we
hurried through back in November!
