A young woman stands on a bench in front of the Ostzone bar in Berlin, waving a bottle of apple schnapps. "Welcome to the coolest city in the world!" she yells. More than 30 young tourists shriek back: "Yeah!"

The tour guide's opening and a taste of hard liquor are the prelude to a Berlin city tour that somehow manages to miss out on sights like the Brandenburg Gate, the Holocaust Memorial and Museum Island.

The woman, whose name is Simone, directs so-called pub crawls -- organized drinking tours through Berlin's central Mitte district that see dozens of young visitors move into a bar, get drunk at reduced prices for 30 minutes and then move on to the next waterhole like a swarm of alcoholic locusts. "Rock 'n' Roll Tourism" is what organizers like My Berlin Tours call it. Their pithy recommendation? "Drink, don't think."

Low-budget tourism has reached the German capital. Never before have so many foreign tourists come to Berlin. Most of them are British, with US citizens and Italians following a close second and third. This year, Berlin is expecting 17 million overnight stays -- about a million more than last year, when Germany hosted the soccer World Cup. Forty percent of all visitors to Berlin are younger than 35. And they are precisely the target audience for which cheap package deals -- a cheap flight, a cheap place to sleep and cheap drinks -- are designed.

Berlin has long been a hot spot for young backpackers. American Jeff Delware found out about pub crawls from the popular "Lonely Planet" travel guide. To him, they are the "ideal opportunity to see the city and drink." The latter is important because, at 20, alcohol is still off limits for him back home.

Rock 'n' Roll Tourism

Berlin offers "unbeatable value" as a tourist destination, says Christian Tänzler from the Berlin Tourism Marketing company. Out of the roughly 90,000 beds provided by Berlin's around 600 accommodation facilities, about 50,000 are in hotels with up to three stars, hostels, guesthouses and pensions. At places such as the Ostel near Berlin's Ostbahnhof train station, you can spend the night in a shared room for as little as €9 ($12).

But not everyone in Berlin is enthusiastic about the wave of low-budget tourism. The drinking tours have become especially irksome to local authorities and residents -- and even the bars themselves. "Pub crawls ruin the atmosphere," says Lisa Demme, who works in the bar Übereck in east Berlin's up-and-coming Friedrichshain district. In her experience, "people piss in the corner and throw up all over the place," she says.

Berlin police, too, are receiving a growing number of complaints about noise violations and are increasingly being called out to bars to separate drunken brawlers. Problems are caused by British visitors who appear to believe they are on a raucous package holiday on Mallorca, or Americans who mistakenly assume German beer is as watered-down as US brews.