Pinkus Müller is a small brewery in the city of Münster, Westphalia, in northwest Germany. The brewery is famous for both its tart altbier and its brewery tap, which is considered one of the main tourist attractions in Münster. The brewery claims to be the oldest producer of organic beer in Germany. It joined Bioland, a farmers organization for organic and health food, in the 1970s and turned all-organic in the late 1980s. The brewery itself is much older. It was founded by Johannes Müller along with a bakery on the same premises in 1816. The name Pinkus is first mentioned in connection with Johannes’ great-grandson Carl Müller (1899–1979), who reputedly earned that nickname as a student, when he and a few friends extinguished a gaslight by urinating on it. “Pinculus” is vulgar Latin for “little pisser.” Later, the enterprising Carl Germanized and shortened “Pinculus” to Pinkus and turned that little gaslight tale into a branding legend. Over the years, Pinkus beers tended to be top fermented and somewhat sour—an old beer style that until World War II was known as “Münstersch Alt.” This beer differed from the better known Düsseldorf altbier, made by such breweries as Uerige, which are darker in color and have a bit more bitterness. See altbier

and uerige brewery. Pinkus Müller’s beer is notably retrograde, a blend of fresh pale amber altbier of medium bitterness and a small portion of aged beer, which is deliberately infected with lactic bacteria, to give the finished product its distinctive tartness. Although Pinkus Müller’s altbier has lost some of these characteristics in recent years, its eccentricities have been well preserved in the unfiltered version called “Spezial.”