Mampe: 195 years of Berlin, poured into six glasses
Berlin's oldest liquor manufacturer runs tours of its Kreuzberg distillery that end in a tasting — from twelve euros for an hour to a gin seminar where you bottle your own.
Mampe has been pouring since 1831. That is nineteen years before the first Berlin train station opened, and the bitter they hand you at the door is still made to that first recipe.
The manufactory sits in the old brewhouse of a wheat beer brewery on Am Tempelhofer Berg, in the middle of Kreuzberg’s Bergmannkiez. It is a working distillery, a liqueur factory and a schnapps shop at the same time. Their own description of the room is hard to improve on: an almost sacred ambience, and the opportunity to breathe in the rich history of Berlin. More Berlin is not possible.
Four ways in
Little Liquor Stories (€12, 45–60 minutes) is the short version, in German — the history, the house, and a tasting at the end. There is a separate Small Schnapps Stories at the same length and the same €12, run in English, which is the one to book if your group would rather not translate as they go.
Great Schnapps Stories (€24, 90 minutes) is the full sitting. It opens with a glass of Mampe Bitter Drops made to the 1831 recipe, then travels from the founding of the brand to the present, walks you through the manufactory, covers the basics of how schnapps is actually made, and pours six spirits. Everyone on it also gets a one-off 10% discount in the shop that day, which is a dangerous thing to hand someone who has just tasted six spirits.
Gin Tasting with your own gin production (€77, 2–2.5 hours) is the one where you stop being an audience. You taste, then you distil, then you bottle what you made and take it home.
There are also two Schnapps Stories on the Sofa boxes — vol. 1 at €49 and vol. 2 at €99 — which are the tasting without the trip, posted to you.
One thing to know before you book
Mampe are refreshingly direct about this: the tours are built for a crowd. In their words, the experience only really becomes fun when there are ten participants or more, and a date with fewer people on it may be cancelled.
Which is an odd thing to read as a solo visitor and very good news if you are looking for something to do with a team. You are not squeezing a group into a format built for couples. The format wants the group.
The scheduled tours run in German; English is available on request, and the English short tour above is already on the books.
Book Mampe for a group
Tell us the date, the headcount and which of the four you fancy, and we'll arrange it with them — including an English tour if you need one.
Also there
The yard shop is open Monday to Friday, 10 to 18, if you only want the bottle. Upstairs of all this they keep a small Mampe museum, and there is a virtual walk-through of the location on their site if you would like to see the room before you commit a team to it.
Their next open dates are on the Twiggli calendar. Each format keeps its own slot: the English short tour on Wednesdays at 15:00 and Fridays at 14:00, the German short one Wednesdays and Saturdays at 14:00, the 90-minute Great Schnapps Stories Wednesdays and Saturdays at 16:00, and the gin seminar on Saturday evenings at 18:00.