First off you have to take all modern German beer and pour it down the sink. Although lagering (i.e. cold aging) was certainly done that far back, you didn't have anything like modern lagers. Lager yeast seems to be a hybrid between ale yeast and some kind wild New World yeast, possibly from Argentina. How that hybrid yeast ended up in German beer cellars is unclear but we don't have to worry about it because our Berlin burgher is going to be drinking top-fermenting beer with a wide variety of ingredients, the sort of beer that predominated in northern Germany before the malign influence of the Reinheitsgebot was imposed on northern Germany following German unification.
So, we're going to be getting some really old school beer that looks totally unlike modern German beer, but what kind? For a long time Berliner Weisse predominated in Berlin, which is a sour, low ABV wheat beer that almost went extinct before undergoing a very minor revival in recent years. It'd be probably be easier to find Gose for sale these days than Berliner Weisse and Gose is a roughly analogous style except a bit salty, which isn't the case with Berliner Weisse. For more information about this kind of beer and other older styles of German beer see Der Vollkommene Bierbrauer oder kurzer Unterricht all Arten Bier zu brauen (1784). It's main points are summarized here in English: http://www.europeanbeerguide.net/gerstyle.htm
But we have a problem. You want 17th century beer, not 18th century. 17th century is a bit too early for Berliner Weisse and our information gets a bit more murky that far back but the kind of beer that your burgher was probably drinking would've been broyhan, which is now extinct.
Broyhan originated in Hannover, not Berlin, but Hannover was a big exporter of beer and Berliner Weisse SEEMS to be a descendant of that style of beer so it's a safe bet that something in the ballpark of broyhan would've been drunk by your burgher as his regular everyday drink.
OK, what the hell was broyhan?
Well, in general, historical styles of beer were a lot more loosely defined than modern ones and shifted around a lot over time and from brewer to brewer. If you do a google search for "broyhan" you'll find all kinds of conflicting things (dark vs. pale, what grains used, hops or not, etc.). because of that. One thing that's universally stated about old school broyhan was that it was a weissbier. In modern times "weissbier" means a wheat beer but that was NOT the case in the early modern period. Weissbier at the time meant that it used air-dried malt (luftmalz) which would've been a lot lighter in color than more heavily kilned malt, giving the beer a light "white" (i.e. "weiss") color. However, broyhan often DID contain wheat.
What else do we know? Broyhan was probably quite weak as pre-modern malting techniques were quite inefficient and older strains of yeast were not very attenuative (i.e. the yeast left a lot of sugars leftover in the beer compared to modern yeast) also some descriptions of it say that it was sour which meant that there was bacteria in the beer competing with the yeast. This is a bit later than I'd like for your question, but a good detailed description of the beer can be found in the 1773 Oekonomische Encyklopädie, the relevant passage translated here: barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2008/03/breihan-broyhan-part-ii.html
"Wiessbier or Breihan
Beer is also brewed from wheat malt, either from that alone or with the addition of barley malt, sometimes without hops, sometimes with a very small amount of hops. The general name of this beer is Breihan or Broihahn; in many pplaces it is also called Weissbier, although this is mostly made from air-dried barley malt [Luft-Malz]. I want to only say this and that, because anyhow you can refer for everything else to the general instructions. When just wheat malt is to be used, which must be air-dried or only very lightly kilned, so that there is no brown to be seen, to give the beer a yellowish-brown colour; so it can be reckoned, for example, for 3 Tonne [1 Braunschweig Tonne = 101.18 litres] beer 12 at most 15 bushels of malt, partly because wheat is more than double the price of barley; partly also because it contains more than twice as much strength, which is extracted during brewing . Brewing itself is carried out exactly as shown on page 153, except that usually when the wort is drawn off it is allowed to run through some hops, although it wouldn't be incorrect, for a brew of 30 Tonne, to soak a few pounds of hops in warm water for 1 or 2 hours and to later mix this extract thoroughly with the wort. To give just one example, I will detail the method of brewing Breihan which Hr. Verf. des Chemischen Lehrbegriffs from the Wallerius gives, and which presumably must be used in Sweden. It consists of the following:
'Take 2.5 parts of barley malt, a half part of wheat malt and as much oat malt and air-dried malt as you want. After they have all been mixed, they are milled, and wort made in the way beer is made, except that a handful of hops is laid in front of the hole in the Gestelkübel [a tub in a frame]. About 3 to 4 Kanne of this [the wort] are specially drawn off; of the remainder, a fifth is boiled and afterwards, while it is still warm, mixed with finely ground spices, such as cloves, cinnamon, coriander seeds, Galgant [ don't know what that one is] and violet root; when it has cooled, start it fermenting with a good fermentation medium, including two parts of French brandy. Afterwards, watch to see when the peaks and towers raised during fermentation begin to collapse. As soon as this happens, the liquid has to be put into barrels and the barrels filled with the wort which was held back.'"
It doesn't note the kind of yeast used or whether there was bacteria in it, because that wasn't well understood back then.
So what do we get? A pale (pale by the standard of the times, which would be less pale than a modern pale lager) very lightly hopped beer with spices and probably some amount of bacteria imparting sourness as more modern Berliner Weiss which seems to have developed out of this style was certainly sour. Later on brewers figured out how to keep bacteria out the beer better but I wouldn't count on 17th century brewers to have a good handle on this.
So, what beer can you buy that would taste like this?
Well, none. Nobody brews beer like this anymore.
But if you want to get in the right ballpark get a Belgian white ale, since those already have coriander generally speaking and maybe sprinkle in a tiiiiiny bit of cinnamon and cloves. Then mix that with a modern Berliner Weisse if you can find it, if not grab any lightly hopped sour wheat beer you can get your hands on, perhaps a Gose, then water the mix down a bit (early modern beers wouldn't have been as carbonated as modern ones and were fairly weak) and a little bit of sugar syrup to imitate the lower level of attenuation. That won't be quite right, but it'll be as close as you can get unless there's some very niche craft beer floating around that I haven't heard of. Even if you can find a revival broyhan beer it probably won't be right since that style changed around later on and the revival will probably be based on a recipe from much later than the time period you want.
The answer above by u/daztur is very good, specifically as to the weissbier category. But perhaps the most surprising difference between 17th Century German beers and contemporary German beers is the smokiness of virtually every beer that wasn’t a weissbier, i.e. any beer that required the malt to be kiln dried.
In “Historic German and Austrian Beers for the Home Brewer,” Andreas Krennmair explains that German breweries went through a significant change in the first half of the 18th Century when many of them first adopted English-style smoke-free kilns. Prior to the development in England of smoke-free kilns, malt was either dried in the air (producing the sour weissbiers described above), or it was dried in a kiln that was open to the fire’s smoke and therefore took on a distinctly smoked flavor. Even a minority proportion of smoked malt is noticeable in a brew, and so any “brown beer” (beer made with kiln-dried malt) would have had a smoky character. Perhaps a rauchbier might be the closest you could find on the market today, though the yeasts may not be the same as u/daztur explained in their post.
For a little more info on Daniel Wheeler’s invention of the English drum kiln and the effect this had on the malting process and the flavors of beer, see https://beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/amp/QPuJzcZGJq
i agree that not much you could find today would match such an old style of beer.
That far back was , i think, before yeast really being known as an organism. Ignoring style differences sanitation surely a big differentiator with modern ales. Most ale would have some level of spoilage going on and would definitly not taste as clean as a modern beer nor be as reproducible.
Every tavern would probably have its own character to their ale due to the methods of the owner/brewer, which would change by the year and season due to lack of control over the processes and ingredients.