SINCE 1904 Early internationalization The current decoration of the German Brewery remains today almost the same as it was known, at the beginning of the 20th century, by the politician and scholar Menéndez Pelayo, a regular at this venue in Plaza de Santa Ana. This brewery was born in 1904 with the original idea of a group of German industrialists to create a place with the same atmosphere as a Bavarian brewery in which beer was served exclusively as a drink (wine was much more popular then): however, as its first advertisement in the press (El Imparcial, March 30, 1904), there you could taste sandwiches of salmon paste, prawns, anchovies and sardines, tea, chocolate and liqueurs, as well as El Águila beer. In 1924, La Alemana passed into the hands of Ramón González, an Asturian who had arrived in Madrid when he was a few years old and who developed a family business that turned the brewery into an essential meeting place: Valle Inclán, Jardiel Poncela, Luis Miguel Dominguín, Ava Gardner and, it could not be missing, Hemingway, were some of the regulars at the place over the years. Even the hippies chose it as a meeting place in the 70s! And today, after two generations, the descendants of Don Ramón continue with the tradition of maintaining La Alemana as a benchmark among the classic venues in Madrid.