 |
||
| Bunyamin Turksoy, a Turkish businessman, sees the Turkish youth in Germany as an untapped market for his beer. | ||
A photograph hanging in Bunyamin Turksoy's corner office shows the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, with a broad smile on his face - and a glass of cloudy white Raki liquor in his hand.
It's inspiration for Turksoy, a German-Turkish entrepreneur who has come out with a new brand of beer called Bey. He is targeting the beer toward young Turks in Germany, betting they are German enough to enjoy a few pilsners but Turkish enough to appreciate an ethnic brand.
"You rarely see this picture of Ataturk, because he's drinking," Turksoy said in his warehouse office in Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley. "I thought it was perfect."
There are some 2.7 million ethnic Turks in Germany, about 3.3 percent of the population. While many of the older generation came from rural Turkey and do not drink because Islam prohibits alcohol, Turksoy sees the largely well-integrated Turkish youth in Germany as an untapped market.
Bey's label features the Genoese Galata Tower, a landmark of Istanbul's cosmopolitan Beyoglu district. It is also brewed according to the 16th-century Bavarian purity law mandating that beer include just malted grain, hops, yeast and water.
Turksoy set recipe standards for Bey last year and contracted with a large commercial brewery to make a test run of more than a million pints. Since then he has signed up 2,000 kiosks and pubs in North Rhine-Westphalia, the German state that includes the Ruhr region, to sell bottled Bey. His sales staff is adding eight locations each day, he said, and hopes to reach 5,000 this year.
Turksoy, 48, is a second-generation entrepreneur. His father came to Germany in 1963 as a miner, one of tens of thousands of Turks who helped revive the country as an industrial powerhouse.
He quit the mines after a year to open a supermarket, which led him to his own cross-cultural invention: a spicy garlic sausage. The sausage is made without pork - a staple of the German diet that most Turks do not eat - and slaughtered in line with Islamic dietary requirements. He eventually sold the brand, Sucuk, and the family diversified into distribution and agriculture.
Turksoy's mother returned to Turkey after a decade in Germany, and he grew up between the two countries. After studying economics in Turkey he met his German wife in Muenster in the early 1980s.
His first and unsuccessful endeavor in beer was to build a German-style brewery in Turkey. But he could not attract interest in a country where those who aren't teetotalers prefer Efes, the Turkish pilsner that commands 80 percent of the market.
So Turksoy flipped his business model, envisioning a fresh, Turkish product for a market dominated by brands that have been brewing for centuries.
"It's a complete hole in the market," said Willi Moeller, one of two brewing insiders that Turksoy lured away from bigger operations to work as his sales managers. Moeller was the national sales director for Flensburger, a northern German beer sold in distinctive pop-top bottles, before he heard the pitch for Bey at a trade fair.
"So many Germans vacation in Turkey, and so many Turks live here," he said. "That's a ready-made customer base who would know and love the brand from the beginning."
To find a recipe for Bey, Turksoy and his team tested different brews on international students at the University of Dortmund - and cut their preferences right down the middle.
"We wanted to find what their tastes had in common," Turksoy said.
The result is light, wheaty beer with a bright yellow hue - a pleasant, low-hops brew that tastes much like scores of others available in Germany.
A taste that doesn't leave a unique impression is a major handicap for an upstart brand in an overcrowded market, said Peter Hahn, CEO of the German Brewers' Association. Already, 1,300 brewers here make 5,000 varieties of beer, he said.
"It's conceivable that someone could break in with an innovation. But this beer is no innovation," Hahn said. "This is a beer like all the others."
Turksoy argues the unremarkable taste will in fact help Bey by breaking Germany's regional conceit. The most distinctive beers are often only popular or even available in their home state, with a few national exceptions, such as Beck's.
Turksoy is eyeing the right moment to expand into Berlin, where some 200,000 ethnic Turks live. He also takes pride in the ethnic branding of his product.
"Turkish people here - they don't belong in Germany, and they don't belong in Turkey," said Turksoy, who became a German citizen just two years ago. "Now they can say, this is something that belongs to them."
(AP)
