Demory: The First Craft Brewery in Paris

When Brewer Kai Lorch founded Demory Paris, Paris’s first craft brewery, in 2009, it wasn’t with the goal of making the nerdiest, craftiest brews. All he wanted, he says, was to make a beer for locals. 

“I wanted to become the local Parisian beer.” 

This, he says, meant compromising a touch on the funk that characterizes so much of the craft beer scene. “I always knew I had to give the people, a little bit, what they want,” he says. “Which is not what you really want to do as a craft brewer. You want to just do your own thing.” 

That said, in his way, Lorch has.  

Before founding the brewery, Lorch had already lived a thousand lives: He’d attended a French boarding school before graduating from high school in both the U.S. and Germany. He had studied business administration in Switzerland, and he’d even worked for a subsidy of Richemont, the second-largest luxury goods company in the world. But beer was his birthright; it had always been dear to the Munich native’s heart. 

“In Munich, if you start drinking a glass of wine, people stop talking,” he says. “They go like… what’s your problem? What’s up with you?” 

Lorch’s innate love of beer had only deepened upon encountering the American craft brewing scene. He and a friend even considered launching their own craft brewery in Munich, and while the project didn’t pan out, he recalls, “it stuck in my mind.” He spent his university years studying beer, even writing his thesis about small- and medium-sized breweries. And when finally the time felt ripe, France felt like the ideal place to launch. 

In 1998, this required incredible foresight on Lorch’s part. Despite craft beer burgeoning in America beginning in the 1980s, over a decade later, Paris’s beer culture wasn’t even nascent; it was non-existent. 

“When I arrived, it was blonde, blanche, brune,” he says. “If you came in with a hefeweizen, they didn’t know what that was.”  

But Paris was his dream. Just a few months before Gallia, now owned by Heineken, swung wide its doors, Lorch launched his Demory. The name, he says, came from Paris’s oldest real brewery, dating back to 1827.  

“Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote that they used to go dancing at Demory,” he says. “You can just imagine that they didn’t go alone; they went with their other artist friends and all this stuff. So it was a big part of Parisian life back then.” 

A riff on that original bleu, blanc, rouge label soon graced the packaging of his initial core range: a pilsner, a hefeweizen, and a schwarzbier. But even this small selection, he says, proved difficult to get off the ground. 

“People didn’t appreciate that you would go through all that hustle to make lager beers,” he says. “There are countries like in America where they’d go, oh, that’s a lager, a black lager, that’s awesome, so they would really appreciate the fact that you go through that. Here… they didn’t care.” 

So he took a step back. His original blonde was unfiltered, which gave many drinkers pause; he opted, instead, to filter it to make it more palatable to the people. The schwarzbier, meanwhile, he gave up on entirely, noting that while it had some bona fide fans, it was tough to dethrone Guinness as the token dark beer in Parisian bars. 

But things developed incredibly quickly, he says, with countless small breweries opening beginning in 2015 and a beer culture that advanced at an incredible speed.   

“They tried to catch up really fast. They didn’t want to wait,” he says of French beer drinkers. “All the movements that were in America since the 2000s were crammed into a couple of years.” 

And at Demory, he has more than kept up. 

Today, Lorch’s core range includes five beers. There’s Citra Lager, an easy-drinking Munich Helles dry-hopped with Citra right at the end. There’s Paris Blanche, a mashup of the German hefeweizen Lorch terms his favorite style and a more Belgian-style witbier, with a slight sour notes and aromas of ripe banana. There’s a Bière de Garde, France’s only native beer style, which, at 6.9 ABV, is the strongest in the core range. It’s named after Sainte-Geneviève, Paris’s patron. Lorch dubs the “crushable” Audacieuse “a beginner’s New England IPA.” And then there’s his bestseller, the Paris IPA. 

Paris’s thirst for IPA, he says, began in 2015. Before this point, he says, the style was strikingly absent in both bars and grocery stores. In 2009, he says, “there was no question I could get an IPA on the market here. I didn’t even try.” By 2017, about 14,000 hectoliters of IPA were sold throughout France. By 2020, that had more than septupled to 100,000.  

“It changed very quickly,” says Lorch. 

He characterizes his Paris IPA as fairly “old-school.” At just 5.5% alcohol with a barely-there bitterness, he muses, some may even term it more of a pale ale. But for Lorch, that’s not a problem. 

“It’s just… drinkable, you know?” he says. And it has to be; after all, he says, “it’s our moneymaker.” 

That’s in large part because his is the IPA running through so many Parisian taps. Ninety percent of his production is sold to bars, and given the market demand for IPA, a Paris-made one is a no-brainer. 

“There are so many bars who say, I’d like to have a French beer,” he says. “And so gradually, our IPA became the most important beer.” 

Lorch’s nerdier side is more than assuaged by temporary brews, such as fruitier NEIPAs, bright sours, or heady double IPAs, which often feature at his two bars, Bar Demory in the Marais and l’Intrépide in Montmartre. That said, the craft beer scene has hit a bit of a snag in Paris, of late. Given the economic downturn, expensive craft beer is far from everyone’s top priority. It’s rendered all the more difficult in the post-covid period, which Lorch says has notably almost entirely done away with the Thursday afterwork drinking crowd.  

“Just starting out in Paris, now, like I did, would be very, very difficult,” he says. “So I was lucky in that perspective.” 

But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have plans for the future. He wants to make a sour beer with local Montmorency cherries; he wants to experiment more with French malts and hops. He’s begun marketing his bottled beers at cavistes, but he’s also launched a line of tallboys. He’s hoping to increase his production from last year’s  8,500 hectoliters to 12,000, a leap facilitated by his new state-of-the-art packing line. And he’s particularly excited by collaborations with other brewers near and far. 

“Collabs are amazing, because basically, it’s just drinking beer with friends,” he says. “You do the recipe together, and you just stand around the thing, they let you add the hops, but the rest, more or less, is just a recipe. That’s really what beermaking is.” 

His collabs are wide-ranging, from a Kvass-style beer with Hop Hooligans in Bucharest to an English-style ale with Moor Beer Co. in Bristol or the If You Like Piña Coladas sour with coconut and pineapple brewed with Freigeist Bierkultur in Stolberg. And that’s just the beginning. 

“That’s the advantage of being a Parisian brewery,” he says. “It’s not that difficult to find people who want to come visit you.” 

But at the end of the day, when it comes to Lorch’s personal go-tos, he tends to skew classic. 

“I like them all, but honestly, if I go out, I just drink normal pilsners,” he says. His recent Einkorn Unicorn, a Kolsch-style collab with Birificio Italiano, is a simple blonde with foam he terms perfect.  

“It’s just such a beautiful beer, but it’s just a blonde beer,” he says. “There are these little things that just make a beer perfect.” 

For more information about Demory Paris, visit the official website.