A law, a pharmacist, a book
Kitzingen am Main, 1482: the town gives itself the oldest known German wine law. Even then it was about what it's still about today, namely honest work in the cellar. That, of all places, home winemaking found its home here a good four hundred years later therefore fits.
In 1897 the pharmacist Paul Arauner founded his business in Kitzingen. A pharmacist, and you can tell to this day: clean work, precise dosing, cultured yeast instead of hoping for wild fermentation. Arauner brought cellar craft out of the wine estates and into the households, with yeasts, airlocks, fining agents and above all with knowledge. His best-known legacy, the Kitzinger Wine Book, was printed over 750,000 times. Generations set up their first demijohn of apple wine with it, their first mead, their first blackcurrant wine.
On 31 May 2024, after 127 years, the business in Kitzingen ended. No bang, no scandal, simply the end of a long story. What remains are the remaining stocks of the original products and a treasure of knowledge too good to gather dust in archives.
And what does Aachen have to do with it?
This is where we come in. We are Maischewerk, a small business from Aachen. So that everything is clear from the start: we are not a wine estate. We have no vines on the slope and no vaulted cellar from the 15th century. We are traders and do-it-yourselfers. With us the demijohns bubble in the workshop, not just in the catalogue. When we recommend a yeast, we've set it up ourselves, and if a batch tipped on us, we tell you that too.
When the Kitzingen business closed, fortunately that was not the end of the recipes: with Joenos there is a successor from the Franconian wine country that carries on the Arauner heritage, from cultured yeast to yeast nutrient. Our task at Maischewerk is a different one: we bundle the best of this world in one place. The last original Kitzinger remaining stocks from our warehouse, while stocks last. The Joenos products, with which the story goes on. And carefully selected accessories, fermentation vessels, measuring devices, chosen by the same standards a pharmacist applied to his work in 1897: it has to work, it has to be clean, and it has to be explainable. With us, the knowledge of how to work with it belongs to every product.
Why “Maischewerk”?
The mash is the beginning of everything: crushed fruit, must, honey water. The moment when ingredients become a batch. And a “Werk” is a workshop. Maischewerk is thus the place for everything that ferments: wine, mead, cider, vinegar, ferments. We supply you with the material and the instructions to go with it, step by step, with amounts, temperatures and waiting times instead of pretty words.
The Kitzinger heritage obliges us to two things: precision and honesty. That's why we also tell you what you don't need for the start. A fermentation vessel, an airlock, a cultured yeast, a thermometer, with that you get astonishingly far. The rest is patience. That we can't sell you. But we can show you how to endure it.