After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the symbols of daily life in East Germany soon started to disappear as well.

The Ostmark currency, the beloved but dreadful excuse for an automobile known as the Trabant, the charmless Interflug national airline; all eventually vanished.

At least one thing from the German Democratic Republic, however, didn’t disappear, and has in fact thrived since reunification.

That would be Kostritzer Schwarzbier, a “black” lager that has been made in the eastern part of Germany since the 16th century.

In fact, legend has it that writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once drank loads of the stuff while convalescing in the spa town of Bad Kostritz.

Supposedly, it served as a general tonic and restorative. A dark beer that is good for you? That might sound familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a sign in a pub advertising Ireland’s most famous brewing export.

If you think of Schwarzbier as Germany’s answer to porters and stouts, you actually wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

It’s lighter in body than most stouts, but has much of the dark chocolate and roasted flavours of its more familiar Irish and British cousins, along with a bit of caramel sweetness. It’s also got a similar dark brown appearance.

Once only popular in the eastern German province of Thuringia, Schwarzbier is now a favourite of people across Germany (not to mention many other parts of the globe), thanks in part to the distribution skills of the Bitburger brewing conglomerate, which bought Kostritzer in 1991.

In 1990, the last year before Bitburger – one of the biggest brewing groups in the former West Germany – took over, there were just 7,000 hectolitres of Kostritzer Schwarzbier brewed each year. Today, production is up to roughly 384,000 hectolitres.

So is part of Schwarzbier’s growing appeal that it’s one of the last surviving East German products? People, after all, have started clubs devoted to the Trabant, and the former East German Vitacola has even been revived. The head of the brewery, though, doesn’t think Schwarzbier is getting a retro-kitsch boost in sales.

That’s because he figures most Germans probably don’t even know it’s from the eastern part of the country, anyway.

“I do not see this nostalgic wave as a part of our sucess; Bad Kostritz is a very small city and … a lot of people believe that it is a part of Bavaria,” said Andreas Reimer, managing director of the Kostritzer Schwarzbierbrauerei.

The Bavarians only wish they could take credit for this one.

TheStar.com | living | Beer from beyond the Wall