Category Archives: History

History, Water

An Attempt To Reconstruct Historic Vienna Lager’s Water Profile

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In the reconstruction of everything related to historic Vienna Lager, there is one piece missing that I’ve not been able to conclusively reconstruct so far: its water profile, and in particular, the water profile at Kleinschwechater Brauerei, where Anton Dreher first brewed Vienna Lager.

People who read my book on the subject are probably already aware of this, but for those who are not, a quick recap of the water situation there: the original Kleinschwechater brewery was located next to Kleinschwechat’s cemetery. The cemetery was on Löss soil (wind-blown silt sediment), while the brewery’s wells were dug into soil consisting of alluvial resp. diluvial gravel. By 1869, the brewery had four wells that had gone bad due to contamination from brewery and animal waste, so two further wells had been dug in the garden next to the brew house. Of these two wells, one’s water was used for brewing, for which we have a chemical analysis conducted in 1868 by Johann Karl Lermer. It looks like this:

  • Specific gravity of water: 1.00074
  • Total dissolved solids: 0.380 grams per litre (=380 mg/L)
  • Ash content: 0.296 grams per litre
  • Organic matter: 0.084 grams per litre

The dissolved solids were analysed and their constituents were listed in percent:

  • Sodium chloride: 2.53%
  • Chlorine: 3.86%
  • Sodium: 3.45%
  • Potassium: 3.94%
  • Calcium carbonate: 22.75%
  • Magnesium: 11.27%
  • Iron oxide: 0.30%
  • Sulfuric acid: 18.03%
  • Phosphoric acid: 0.22%
  • Carbon dioxide: 24.42%
  • Silicic acid: 2.52%
  • Organic matter: 1.49%

(please note that I think I previously misidentified the “Kalk” in the original German text as calcium oxide. It more likely means calcium carbonate, which I corrected in this list)

This is fairly detailed, but how does this get us to a modern water profile consisting of carbonate hardness, calcium, magnesium, sulfate, chloride and sodium? So here’s my attempt of trying to reconstruct that. Please be aware is that my last time I had chemistry lessons was 23 or 24 years ago. I also never thought myself to be a particularly good chemistry student.

I started off with the individual weight of each of the chemical compounds: 380 mg/L is equal to 380 ppm. Applying the percentage to the 380 ppm of should give us the respective ppm of each compound. Please note that I only listed the ones relevant for our water profile:

  • Sodium chloride (NaCl): 9.6 ppm
  • Chlorine: 14.7 ppm
  • Sodium: 13.1 ppm
  • Calcium carbonate (CaCO3): 86.4 ppm
  • Magnesium: 42.8 ppm
  • Sulfuric acid (H2SO4): 68.5 ppm
  • Carbon dioxide (CO2): 92.8 ppm

I then looked up the molecular formulas for each of the chemical compounds, as well as the molar masses of all the elements found in each of the compounds.

So now let’s use this data to reconstruct what we need in our water profile.

Carbonate Hardness

Carbonate hardness is basically the concentration of HCO3–(hydrogencarbonate) ions. While we do not have this one available directly, we can reconstruct the amount from the amount of CO2. The molar mass of CO2 is about 44.0088 g/mol, so adding the mass of one H and one C gets us about 61.01604 g/mol. When we apply this to the ppm of CO2 (92.8), we get an HCO3– concentration of 128.7 ppm, or 5.9 °dH (German degrees of hardness).

Calcium

For the calcium content, we need to go the other way, and look at the calcium content of the calcium carbonate. CaCO3‘s molar mass is about 100.0088 g/mol, while Ca’s molar mass is just 40.08 g/mol, so the 86.4 ppm of calcium carbonate should translate to about 34.6 ppm of calcium, or 4.8 °dH.

Magnesium

That one is easy, because it’s listed directly, with 11.27%, which translates to 42.8 ppm.

Sulfate

The sulfate ion is SO42-, so we should be able to reconstruct it from the sulfuric acid (H2SO4) content, following the same approach as with the calcium. H2SO4‘s molar mass is about 98.08 g/mol, while SO42- is about 96.06 g/mol, so the reconstructed sulfate content should be 67.1 ppm.

Chloride

Chlorides are either chlorine ions or chlorine atoms bound to molecules by a single bond. In Lermer’s analysis, we have two chemical compounds that involve chlorine atoms: chlorine, and sodium chloride. From the chlorine, we can simply assume the same ppm (14.7 ppm), while for the sodium chloride, we need to calculate its portion (5.8 ppm). When we add both, the total chloride content should be 20.5 ppm.

Sodium

Similar to the chlorides, we have two chemical compounds that involve sodium atoms: straight up sodium, as sodium chloride. Following the same approach, we can take the ppm of sodium (13.1 pm) and add the sodium portion from the sodium chloride (3.8 ppm). This means we end up at 16.9 ppm sodium content.

The final water profile

With all this, we end up with this water profile:

  • Carbonate hardness: 128.7 ppm, or 5.9 °dH
  • Calcium: 34.6 ppm, or 4.8 °dH
  • Magnesium: 42.8 ppm, or 9.9 °dH
  • Sulfate: 67.1 ppm
  • Chloride: 20.5 ppm
  • Sodium: 16.9 ppm

My question to all you people out there with a better knowledge of basic chemistry than me: does this make sense? Provided the German terms for the individual chemical compounds that I translated to English mean exactly what I think they mean, does it make sense to derive the amounts of ions in the water from the amount of molecular compounds determined in that chemical analysis?

Please let me know in the comments whether this attempt of reconstructing the historic water profile of Vienna Lager at Kleinschwechater brewery (at least as analysed in 1868) makes sense or not.

(thanks to Ben for proofreading the article before I published it)

History

19th Century Brewing in Württemberg

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In my research yesterday about beer production statistics in Southern Germany, I came across a curious bit of information, namely that an incredibly large number of top-fermenting breweries operated in Württemberg in the late 19th century, but they on average produced only relatively small amounts of beer.

I then dug a bit further and noticed that statistics for Württemberg made a distinction between “commercial breweries” (using the German term “gewerbsmäßig”, referring to an operation done in order to generate income) and “private breweries” (“Privatbrauereien” in German).

Normally, “private breweries” at the time referred simply to privately owned breweries, as opposed to publicly owned breweries (of which people own shares) or communal breweries (owned e.g. by the citizens of one particular town or city by virtue of their citizenship). But in this case, the private breweries were strangely juxtaposed with commercial ones… so, were private breweries non-commercial?

Turns out, yes: in parliamentary records of the local parliament of Württemberg from 1853, I found a description of what constituted private brewing: it was the non-commercial brewing by Upper Swabian farmers, where it was customary for all farmers who owned larger farms to also own a brewing kettle in order to brew beer for their own use, which included the house drink for the farm workers (the records’ context is a discussion about taxation of malt and how it disadvantages brewing farmers as opposed to those who make wine or cider; the German text uses the word “Obstmost”, presumably referring to any fermented alcoholic beverage made from fruit).

An 1871 article about the brewing history of Württemberg gives more insight: Württemberg has traditionally been more of a wine and cider country. Brewing really only started in 1630 in Stuttgart, but was again banned in 1663 in favour of wine growing. Only two breweries with a brewing monopoly (and owned by the sovereign) were allowed to brew and sell beer. This monopoly was only disbanded on 17 March 1798, and in the years after, private breweries were formed, but only with the territorial gains between 1803 and 1810, new regions were added to Württemberg in which beer brewing was already common (the areas of Württemberg before that time are called Altwürttemberg, lit. Old Württemberg, the newly added parts Neuwürttemberg, lit. New Württemberg). In the following years, beer production increased without the wine or cider production or consumption going down in any way.

A map of the Kingdom of Württemberg after 1815
A map of the Kingdom of Württemberg after 1815

In fact, by 1874, Württemberg was the German state with the second-highest annual beer production per capita at 154.3 liters, only surpassed by Bavaria with 240.6 liters.

In later parliamentary records from 1890/1891 (again discussing taxation of malt resp. beer), the beer brewed by farmers as house drink is specifically referred to as top-fermented or white beer, which sounds like private brewers were mostly brewing top-fermented beers.

This is also reflected in the Württemberg brewery statistics for 1896/1897. For that year, 1805 commercial and 4,385 private breweries were recorded. Top-fermented beer was brewed by 336 commercial breweries and 4,383 private breweries, while bottom-fermented beer was brewed by 1,767 commercial and just 4 private breweries. Interestingly, these numbers don’t quite add up, which means that some breweries, both commercial and (probably two) private ones, brewed both top- and bottom-fermented beer.

But private breweries weren’t to last: while there were still 5,252 of them operating in 1890/1891, the number fell down to 2,137 in 1909/1910. The number was not consistently going down, though, but rather up and down with an overall downwards trend especially noticeable from about 1904/1905.

A graph with the number of private breweries in Württemberg between 1890/1891 and 1909/1910.
The number of private breweries in Württemberg between 1890/1891 and 1909/1910.

Unfortunately, 1909/1910 is the last fiscal year for which I’ve been able to find separate numbers of private breweries.

In roughly the same time period, white beer production also fell massively, from 110,168 hl in 1890/1891, down to just 15,524 hl in 1913/1914.

Graph of the amount of white beer brewed in Württemberg between 1889/1890 and 1913/1914
The amount of white beer brewed in Württemberg between 1889/1890 and 1913/1914

So, to summarise, private breweries were non-commercial breweries operated by farmers in the beer region of Württemberg to brew beer to be consumed in their own household and by their farm workers. The vast majority of that beer was top-fermented. Private breweries were only permitted from 1798 when the beer brewing monopoly of Württemberg was abolished, but only grew in the years after land was redistributed between German states. So while Württemberg had farmhouse brewing in the 19th century, it was not a tradition per se in Old Württemberg, where the common fermented alcoholic beverages were wine and cider, and only gained foothold during the 19th century. None of the sources that I found mentioned whether this farmhouse brewing already existed in the territories that later comprised New Württemberg before they were made part of Württemberg.

History

Top- vs. Bottom-Fermenting Breweries in Parts of Southern Germany 1889/1890

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I previously wrote about top- vs bottom-fermenting breweries in Germany (in particular the Northern German Brewing Tax Association), and then specifically about Prussia, Germany’s biggest state at the time, as the individual provinces were very different in how widespread bottom-fermenting breweries were.

What was still missing was the South of Germany. While I still don’t have full statistics, I at least have some numbers: full numbers of top- and bottom-fermenting breweries and respective production volumes for Bavaria and Württemberg, for Alsace-Lorraine we only have the number of breweries.

Please note that the statistics are for different time period: Bavaria’s numbers are for all of 1889, while Württemberg’s and Alsace-Lorraine’s numbers are for the fiscal year 1889/1890, i.e. 1 April 1889 until 31 March 1890. For Alsace-Lorraine we only know the total production volume (797,807 hl) not split up by top- vs bottom-fermenting, while for Baden we only have the total number of brewing vessels (1,918), their combined volume (17,198 hl), and the total production volume (1,630,976 hl), but nothing divided by top- vs bottom-fermenting.

Also, the data on Bavaria distinguishes between “brown beer brewery” and “white beer brewery”, but brown beer was equivalent with bottom fermentation, while white beer was equivalent with top fermentation.

BreweriesProduction Volume [hl]
StateTFBFTFBF
Bavaria 1,6215,260212,22814,062,842
Württemberg4,8702,31590,2873,328,793
Alsace-Lorraine8150n/an/a

What is very noticeable how small the top-fermenting breweries must have been: while the average bottom-fermenting Bavarian brewery would have brewed 2,673 hl, the average top-fermenting Bavarian only brewed 130 hl per year. So while there was a large number of breweries, most of them probably only brewed at slightly more than home-brew scale, probably only just serving their super local community, or the niche of white beer drinkers within it.

Even more extreme is Württemberg, where the average top-fermenting brewery only produced 18.5 hl per year, even an order of magnitude smaller than the average Bavarian brewery. That’s just 35.5 liters per week, probably only just enough for what a single pub or inn was selling in that time period. And don’t forget that these are averages, so there were likely breweries that brewed even less.

Now I wonder even more about top-fermented beer in Württemberg. Like, was it a cottage industry of small brew pubs or inns of de-facto homebrewers serving small niches of white beer drinkers? Was this something originally rooted in a farmhouse brewing culture we don’t know about yet? The statistics tell us nothing about whether any of that top-fermented beer in Württemberg was even sold or whether it was brewed for home consumption. 35.5 liters would be just enough to serve the weekly consumption of a farm, that’s about 5 Maß of beer per day.

I think there’s a lot more research that needs to be done about top-fermented beer in Württemberg in the late 19th century.

History

Anton Dreher Jr.’s 1878 Patent on Pasteurisation

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I recently came across a patent (Reichsprivileg, lit. Imperial Privilege, as they were called at the time) about a conservation method that had been granted to Anton Dreher Jr. which he had submitted in August 1878.

As the patent submission was entirely handwritten in Kurrent, the predominant cursive handwriting in Austria at the time, I had great troubles reading it (despite having learned the basics in elementary school, 31 or 32 years ago, for like a day, just for fun), but sending it through Transkribus with a special Kurrent model yielded great results that required only very little correction.

Reading the patent itself was actually quite interesting: it specifically acknowledges “the famous French chemist” Pasteur’s work on pasteurisation of beer and wine to improve their shelf life and transport stability for export into tropical countries. One limitation they still had was it required sturdy packaging, which at the time were either well-sealed stoneware or extra thick glass bottles, in which the beer had to be pasteurised. Otherwise, all the carbon dioxide would escape, or even worse, the packaging would not withstand the internal pressure.

With all the carbon dioxide removed, the beer would only be an “unpalatable alcoholic extract”, the Imperial Privilege says. The disadvantage of the required sturdy bottles was that they were very heavy, which greatly increased the freight costs.

Dreher’s approach was the following: the beer was packaged into any vessel that could be tightly sealed, such as glass bottles, stoneware bottles, or casks. The packaged beer was then put into a larger vessel that could withstand internal pressures of up to 10 atmospheres (roughly 10 bar, or 147 psi), the vessel was filled with water and sealed up. The water was then heated either through direct firing or steam to the degree it should be heated.

Through thermometers and pressure gauges, the temperature and internal pressure could be determined and based on that, the required counterpressure in the sealed vessel could be applied and adjusted.

Once the required temperature has been reached, cooling is started by applying cold water. As the internal pressure is lowered, the counterpressure equally needs to be lowered, until everything has cooled down to regular atmospheric temperatures.

The specific novelty of this approach, according to the Imperial Privilege, is that it allowed pasteurisation of beer for export in any vessel instead of just sturdy bottles.

The header of the submitted Imperial Privilege, literally saying “description”, with a crossed-out 1877 revenue stamp with a face value of 15 Kreuzer, and Emperor Franz Josef’s face on it.

You can find the original letters in the digital archive of Imperial Privileges of the Austrian Patent Office, while this is the transcription of the German text:

Der berühmte Französische Chemiker Pasteur hat zuerst darauf hingewiesen, dass gegohrene Getränke, als: Wein und Bier eine grössere Haltbarkeit und Transportfähigkeit in tropische Länder erlangen, wenn dieselben bis zur Siedhitze erwärmt und darauf wieder abgekühlt werden. Die Erfahrung hat die Zweckmäßigkeit dieses Verfahrens bestätigt und es ist der früher unmögliche oder wenigstens höchst riskante Transport solcher Getränke in tropische Länder wesentlich erleichtert worden.

Die Erwärmung des Bieres ist nun mit Schwierigkeiten verbunden, weil die Kohlensäure, bekanntlich ein Hauptbestandtheil des Bieres, bei dem Erwärmen entweicht und nur ein ungeniessbarer alkoholhaltiger Extract übrig bleibt. Um nun die Kohlensäure auch in dem erwärmten Biere zu conserviren, müsste man bisher zu dem Erwärmen Gefäße wählen, welche das Entweichen derselben verhindern. Dazu eigneten sich nur Glas- oder Steingutflaschen, welche um dem Drucke der Kohlensäure und Ausdehnung der durch Erwärmung ausgedehnten Flüchtigkeit zu widerstehen, sehr dickwandig sein müssen.

Dadurch würde aber sowohl die Waare als deren Fracht empfindlich vertheuert.

Es ist mir nun gelungen ein Verfahren zu entdecken, wodurch die Erwärmung des Bieres bei vollkommener Konservirung seiner Kohlensäure in jeder Art dicht verschließbarer Gefässe ermöglicht wird.

Bei dieser Methode wird dem in der Umhüllung befindlichen Biere und seinem durch die Temperatur bedingten Drucke ein Gegendruck entgegengesetzt welcher jenem das Gleichgewicht hält oder ihn noch um etwas überschreitet.

Dadurch wird das Entweichen der Kohlensäure verhindert und der Zweck, das Bier mit seinem ganzen Kohlensäure-Vorrath zum Versandt zu bringen, vollkommen erreicht.

In ein Gefäß, das einen Druck von 3, 4 bis 10 Atmosphären auszuhalten im Stande ist, werden eine beliebige Anzahl Flaschen, Steingutkrüge, Fässer etc gebracht, das Gefäß mit Wasser gefüllt und dann dicht abgeschlossen.

Hierauf wird dus eingefüllte Wasser bis zu dem gewünschten Temperatursgrade entweder mittels direkten Feuers oder durch Dampf erwärmet.

Mit der Erwärmung des die Bierbehältnisse umgebenden Wassers steigert sich natürlich die Wärme des Bieres selbst und damit auch dessen Druck.

Durch Thermometer und Manometer lässt sich seine Temperatur und sein Druck genau constatiren und der nothwendige Gegendruck darnach entsprechend reguliren.

Der Gegendruck wird durch eine einfache Wasserdruckpumpe erzielt.

Ist die Temperatur des Bieres bis zum gewünschten Wärmegrade gestiegen, so wird mit der Abkühlung durch kaltes Wasser begonnen und hauptsächlich daraufgesehen, dass die Abnahme des inneren Druckes mit dem äußeren Gegendrucke gleichen Schritt hält, bis das Bier zur gewöhnlichen atmosphärischen Temperatur abgekühlt ist.

Die Neuheit der eben beschriebenen Entdeckung besteht demnach darin, dass Bier in jeder Art verschliesbarer Gefäße unter Anwendung äußeren Druckes zum Transporte in tropische Länder und zum Transporte überhaupt fähig gemacht werden kann, während früher nur Bier in Flaschen zu diesem Zwecke präparirt werden konnte.

Wien, am 20 August 1878.

History

Photos of Johann Götz from the National Archives in Kraków

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This is a bit of an unusual type of post for my blog. Instead of lots of texts, I’ll be mostly posting a few images instead, namely photos depicting Johann Götz (aka Jan Ewangelista Goetz) that I found in the National Archives in Kraków. The quality may not be the absolutely best, as I basically just took snapshots with my Pixel 6 phone camera, but it’s good enough for now.

None of the photos were dated, so when it comes to the age of them, all I can say is “1893 or earlier”.

Photo of Johann Götz by Awit Szubert, Kraków. Digitisation licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Photo of Johann Götz by Awit Szubert, Kraków.

The first one is a photo taken by Awit Szubert (1837-1919), a photographer from Kraków. In this photo, Johann Götz wears historic clothing of Polish noblemen, a kołpak hat with a feather on his head, and boots. Attached the clothes is some sort of side arm, like a knife or a small sword. Johann Götz is stood next to a table and has his left hand on a book. On the other side of him, there’s a cushioned chair.

Portrait of Johann Götz by Walery Rzewuski. Digitisation licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Photo of Johann Götz in a sitting position with his right arm resting on a table and his left hand resting on his left upper thigh, showing him halfway from the side, by Walery Rzewuski. Digitisation licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The next two photos show Johann Götz wearing a suit jacket with two medals, one around his neck, and one as a breast medal. Both photos were taken by Polish photographer Walery Rzewuski (1837-1888), based in Kraków. The breast medal is the Golden Cross of Merit with the Crown, while the one around his neck is the Knight Commander medal of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Sylvester.

Portrait of Johann Götz by Franz Grainer. Digitisation licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Portrait of Johann Götz by Franz Grainer. Digitisation licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The final set of photos are two portraits of Johann Götz by Franz Grainer (1840-1904) in Reichenhall, Bavaria. Again wearing a suit jacket but this time buttoned up all the way, he looks more serious with a straight head on the left one, but a bit more smiley (as much as that’s noticeable with his beard) with a slightly tilted head on the right one. Franz Grainer was also the court photographer of Princess Therese of Oldenburg, as is noted on the back of one of the photos.

Judging from the years of death of each of the credited photographers, I would say that the photos themselves are all in the public domain (in Poland, copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death). Please note that this is not legal advice.

History

Malt Surrogates in Northern German Beer in 1890/1891

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The German Brewing Tax Law of 1906, which went into effect on June 3, 1906, regulated the permissible ingredients for bottom- and top-fermented beers within the Northern German Brewing Tax Association. From that point onwards, bottom-fermented beers could only be brewed from barley malt, hops, water and yeast, while top-fermented beers could also be brewed using malt made from other grains, various sugars (beer sugar, cane sugar, invert sugar, starch sugar, caramel colouring) and sweeteners (for low-ABV beers only). But before that, beer tax laws in North Germany were much lenient (Bavarians hated that), and ingredients like rice could be used.

I recently came across statistics for the tax year 1890/1891 that give greater insight into that. Previously, I also wrote about bottom- vs top-fermenting breweries in Germany resp. Prussia in 1889/1890. But this goes even more into detail.

I won’t reproduce all the numbers here as that would be too much. But let’s look at some of the highlights:

An average beer brewed in the Northern German Brewing Tax Association in 1890/1891 would have been (by weight of ingredients):

  • 95.75% barley malt
  • 2.78% wheat malt
  • 0.01% other grains
  • 0.51% rice
  • 0.73% sugar
  • 0.03% syrup
  • 0.19% other malt surrogates

The most rice was was used in Bremen (the statistics don’t include 3 export breweries) with 3.23% rice, Mecklenburg with 2.56%, and the Rhineland, with 2.38% of all ingredients used in brewing.

When it comes to brewing sugar, Brandenburg stands out with 2.85% of the total brewing ingredients by weight. They also similarly stand out for the use of wheat malt, with 16.08%. That’s probably an artifact of the Berliner Weisse brewing industry (Berlin was part of Brandenburg) which used plenty of wheat malt. The Province of Posen was number two, with 10.46%, which absolutely makes sense: the city of Grätz/Grodzisk Wielkopolski is located in that historic Prussian province, and is best known for the Grodziskie beer style which is brewed from 100% smoked wheat malt.

It’s also interesting to see what percentage of breweries even used malt surrogates of any kind (including rice, sugar, etc.) in the first place: 83.33% in Bremen, 80.65% in Lübeck, 75% in Hamburg, and 59.46% in Anhalt. On the other end, where malt surrogates were used the least, are these places: Hohenzollern (0.85%, just 2 out of 234 breweries), Westphalia (4.49%), Province of Hesse-Nassau (8.02%) and Grand Duchy of Hesse (12.15%).

In the same statistics, we also get more insight into the distribution of top- vs bottom-fermenting brewing: the top places for bottom fermentation (in terms of production volume) in Northern Germany in 1890/1891 were:

  • Grand Duchy of Hesse, 100% bottom fermentation
  • Province of Hesse-Nassau, 99% bottom fermentation
  • Westphalia, 96% bottom fermentation
  • Brunswick, 95% bottom fermentation

Conversely, the top places where top fermentation still held on were:

  • Kingdom of Saxony, 44% top fermentation
  • Province of Posen, 40% top fermentation
  • Silesia, 39% top fermentation
  • Brandenburg, 38% top fermentation

History

Production Volumes of Johann Götz’s Breweries, 1847-1876

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On my visit to the National Archives in Kraków, I came across quite a bit of material related to Johann Götz and his breweries. So who’s Johann Götz anyway, and what makes his breweries relevant?

Johann Evangelist Götz, or Jan Ewangelista Götz (sometimes spelled Goetz) as he’s called in Polish, was born in 1815 in Langenenslingen in modern-day Baden-Württemberg. Coming from a family of brewers, he was hired as a cellar master in 1837 at the Kleinschwechater brewery by Anton Dreher, who happened to be his cousin. After 1.5 years, he was promoted to brewery foreman and Dreher’s personal assistant. He was closely involved in brewing the first “real” Kleinschwechater Lager in 1840, and has been credited with improved the quality of the beer as well as the brewery’s overall efficiency. He was an important figure in the history of Vienna Lager, but his stint at Kleinschwechat was relatively short, as he moved to Galicia in 1845 where he co-founded the Okocim brewery not far from Kraków.

At a time when bottom-fermentation was still only catching on in Vienna and bakers started to feel a lack of availability of barm (brewer’s yeast, skimmed from fermenters of top-fermented beers), he went to the easternmost realms of the Austrian Empire and started a new, industrial brewery using the techniques he helped develop and perfect together with Anton Dreher. In doing so, he was (to my knowledge) the first one to establish a lager brewery in partitioned Poland.

Besides the brewery in Okocim, he also started another brewery in Kraków, in the Piasek district. One find I was very happy about when I went through the material in the National Archives was a German-language hand-written list of production statistics for both breweries. Though they were not quite complete for all years, they still give us great insight into the overall development and growth of both breweries.

Here are the statistics for the Okocim brewery by year. All amounts are in Eimer. One Eimer equals 56.589 liters, or about 0.566 hl. I added the equivalent hl in parentheses.

Year10° Beer13° Lager BeerCombined
18474,500 (2,546)3,000 (1,698)7,500 (4,244)
18504,900 (2,773)6,240 (3,531)11,140 (6,304)
18555,148 (2,913)12,776 (7,230)17,924 (10,143)
18602,304 (1,304)26,976 (15,265)29,280 (16,569)
18651,336 (756)35,648 (20,173)36,984 (20,929)
18701,200 (679)51,000 (28,860)52,200 (29,539)
18713,750 (2,122)47,850 (27,078)51,600 (29,200)
18721,600 (905)64,000 (36,217)65,600 (37,122)
18733,000 (1,698)80,000 (45,271)83,000 (46,969)

One interesting detail here is how the brewery produced both a 10° beer and a 13° beer (the degrees refer to the original gravity in Balling). This is something we know from Anton Dreher’s brewery, where these two beer strengths were the two main beers brewed at least until the 1890s. Distinguishing beers by OG is also still common in Czechia, though the main strengths there are more commonly 10° and 12°.

It is noticeable though that while the 10° beer was a relatively large share of the overall production in early years, it never grew beyond slightly more than 5,000 Eimer per year, and within 26 years the share of 10° beers in the overall production volume shrank from 60% to just 3.75%. I guess lower-strength beers weren’t particularly popular among Poles at the time…

In the same document, we also get statistics for Götz’s brewery in Kraków. Again the amounts are in Eimer, which the equivalent hectoliter in parentheses next to it.

YearAmount
18662,726 (1,542)
18675,190 (2,937)
18687,800 (4,414)
18698,000 (4,527)
18708,280 (4,685)
187110,600 (5,998)
187214,360 (8,126)
187317,000 (9,620)

Clearly, the Kraków brewery was producing at a much smaller scale. But still, at a combined 100,000 Eimer (56589 hl) for 1873, this was a sizeable brewing operation divided between locations.

The hand-written production statistics of the Götz-owned breweries in Okocim and Kraków, in German

I then also came across printed statistics (in Polish) from a few years after that lists production statistics up to 1876, plus many more details about the equipment and capacity of the Okocim brewery:

YearAmount
18477,500 (4,244)
185724,200 (13,694)
186734,000 (19,240)
187151,600 (29,200)
187265,000 (36,783)
187382,300 (46,573)
187481,600 (46,177)
187580,100 (45,328)
187673,900 (41,819)

In addition to that, we learn more about the brewery capacity: the malting floor had a size of 19,120 square foot (the foot used was probably the Wiener Fuß of about 316mm). The brewery had two brew houses, each of which could produce 3 turns of 220 Eimer each per day, so a theoretical capacity of up to 1,320 Eimer (747 hl) per day in total. Fermentation happened in 116 vats with a capacity of 55 Eimer each, while the lagering cellar held 443 lagering casks of 60 to 150 Eimer each, for a combined total of 47,000 Eimer of beer that could be lagered at once.

Leaflet with statistics about the Okocim brewery, in Polish

And similar information the branch in Kraków:

YearAmount
18675,200 (2,943)
18708,200 (4,640)
187110,600 (5,998)
187214,360 (8,126)
187315,560 (8,805)
187416,300 (9,224)
187518,170 (10,282)
187615,000 (8,488)

Both malt house and brew house were considerably smaller there: the malting floor only had a size of 4,200 square foot, and only one brewing system was in place that could produce 100 Eimer per turn, with up to 2 turns per day. The lagering capacity was also significantly smaller, with only 8,000 Eimer.

Leaflet with statistics about the Götz brewery in Kraków, in Polish

History

Visiting the National Archives in Kraków

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On my recent trip to Kraków, I also spent a few hours at the National Archives to Kraków in an attempt to research two beer/brewing-related topics I’m interested in.

The way the National Archives in Poland work is that they’re decentralised, and archive material is stored geographically close to what it relates to, so if you’re interested in anything relating to Kraków and surroundings, the branch in Kraków is the one to go to.

I struggled a bit initially to understand the overall procedure, so here’s my attempt to document it if anybody else also wants to look up any documents from that archive.

  1. you search the archive for what you want to look up using this search form.
  2. If a document exists in digitised form, you can just read it online.
  3. If a document isn’t digitised yet, you can order it to view in the reading room of the respective archive. For that, you need to write down the archival group (collection) and the archival unit reference number. In this example, the collection would be Akta miasta Krakowa and the reference number would be 29/33/0/3.2.3/Kr 8243.
  4. For every reference number, fill out this form separately.
  5. Once the documents have been retrieved and are ready to be viewed, they will be reserved for 10 working days at the archive under your name, and you will receive a confirmation email that they’re available.
  6. Once you have that confirmation, you can book a time slot at the reading room. Don’t be worried if you only see one or two time slots available. These are just the morning and/or afternoon opening times. You don’t have to be exactly on time, and (at least from what I understood), your table will be available to you the whole morning or afternoon.

And that’s it. In the grand scheme, it’s not that hard, the overall process is just not well-documented yet in English and certain details, like how long will documents be kept for viewing, weren’t clear to me until I received the confirmation email. So always make sure to book your material far enough in advance, but not too far.

Now let’s talk about the archival material itself that I wanted to take a look at: a big reason for me to visit was to find out more about the historic Goldfinger brewery in Kraków. I previously did a little bit of research into Markus Goldfinger through online archives, mostly the Austrian newspaper archives. For more about that, please check out my article about the modern Goldfinger Brewery in Downers Grove, Illinois that I visited in June 2024.

Besides that, I also wanted to see what material there is relating to Johann Götz, the founder of Okocim brewery, as he not only operated his main brewery in Okocim, but also owned and operated a second brewery in Kraków.

Let me just say, my search regarding Johann Götz and Okocim was much more successful than the one regarding Markus Goldfinger and his brewery. There wasn’t much I could find about Goldfinger in the first place, and of two bundles of documents that I ordered, only one was made available to me. What I did get to view was a big bunch of correspondence between members of the Goldfinger family and the magistrate (think of it as the municipal office), most of them stamped with Austrian revenue stamps of 50 Kreuzer each (value nowadays would be roughly €8.50).

There was one letter that caught my eye, though:

A photo of a letter signed by M. Goldfinger and addressed to the Magistrate of Kraków.
A handwritten letter signed by M. Goldfinger, addressed to the Magistrate of Kraków.

What I could identify was the word “piwo” in the fifth row of the main text, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be part of the phrase “piwnicy na piwo”, which translates to “beer cellar”.

Due to work, holidays and then a bit of illness, it took me a while to get it transcribed properly (I used Transkribus plus a lot of manual reading and trying to recognise individual letters because Transkribus’ result was far from perfect), but thanks to a good friend (thanks Filip!), I eventually managed to get it corrected and proof-read. The transcription goes like this:

Swietny Magistracie!

Niżej podpisany właściciel browaru piwnego, ulica św. Filipa, Kleparz w Krakowie uprasza Swietny Magistrat, do odebrania do użytku, budynku Słodowni i piwnicy na piwo w browarze mym jak wyżéj; a to podłóg planu zatwierdzonego przez Swietny Magistrat i rezolucyi L 21142 z dnia 20 września 1889 roku.

M. Goldfinger

Since I don’t speak a word of Polish (well, maybe one… piwo), I used DeepL to translate it for me, and this was the output:

Honourable Magistrate!

The undersigned owner of a beer brewery, St. Philip’s Street, Kleparz, Krakow, requests the Honorable Magistrate to put into use the Malt House and the beer cellar in my brewery as above; this according to the plan approved by the Honorable Magistrate and Resolution L 21142 of 20 September 1889.

M. Goldfinger

While the wording is a bit clunky (according to Filip, the language used in the Polish original is a bit dated), it’s basically a request from Markus Goldfinger to the magistrate for permission to start operating the malt house and the beer cellar.

So there’s a new mystery: why did Mr. Goldfinger require permission to operate a malt house and a beer cellar. Are these by any chance new ones that were built? The brewery was founded about 15 years prior, so the brewery presumably had a beer cellar and the means to malt barley by then (back then, a lot of breweries were still malting themselves).

Nevertheless, a very cool find, and it got me closer than ever before to be able to see and feel hand-written letters from Markus Goldfinger himself.

As for the history of Johann Götz and his breweries, I found a large amount of documents, photos and technical drawings (and interesting ones too!), so there is much more to unpack before I can publish a blog post about it.

History

Which Breweries’ Beers Were Served At Oktoberfest in 1843?

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Bavarikon, Bavaria’s internal portal to present treasures, art and other things from its archives, libraries and museums, is an incredibly valuable platform, as you can find all kinds of random bits and pieces related to Bavaria in some shape or some. They of course have lots of digitalized material about Oktoberfest, like this map of Oktoberfest at Theresienwiese from 1843:

A map of Oktoberfest from 1843. Source. Public Domain.

This is great, because not only does it give us insight into the overall setup (basically, the horse racing course was on the outside of the field, while in the middle, most of the stands could be found, with more stands to be found on the hill on the Western side of Theresenwiese, just north of the Bavaria statue.

Of course, the King had his own tent, with the agricultural exhibition placed near it. On the South side, the shooting range was located, while in the center, the most was going on: lots of places serving beer, coffee, wine, punch, cold and hot food, or pastries, but there were also attractions like a carousel and crossbow shooting, and the Glückshafen, a lottery with the purpose that its profit be used to support the city’s poor. That attraction still exists today, and is the oldest operation at the Oktoberfest.

Most importantly though, we also learn which breweries’ beers were served in 1843:

  • Singelspieler
  • Mader
  • Oberkandler
  • Knor[r]
  • Hacker
  • Löwenbräu
  • Pschor[r]
  • Unterkandler
  • Tölzer (from Tölz; nowadays Bad Tölz)
  • Hesselloher (probably referring to the brewery in Großhesselohe in Pullach, just South of Munich)

Some of these breweries resp. brands are still around, like Hacker and Pschorr in the Hacker-Pschorr brand, and Löwenbräu, while others are less known: Maderbräu is probably best known these day through Maderbräustraße, the little street next to Weißes Brauhaus in Munich: when Georg Schneider had to move out of the old Weißes Brauhaus (roughly where Hofbräuhaus is located nowadays), he managed to buy the defunct Maderbräu brewery building and relocate his brewery there. Only the street name and a sign on the wall of Weißes Brauhaus are reminders of this old Munich brewery.

Sign on the wall of Weißes Brauhaus, Munich. It says “The White Brewhouse. Former historischer Munich brewery. 1490 first mentioned as brewery. 1540 called Maderbräu in a document. 1872 Georg Schneider built his white beer brewery here. 1944 destroyed by incendiary bombs. The undestroyed restaurant is an example of the old Munich pub tradition.”

The other Munich breweries in this list are attested through an old map from the 1830s of Munich breweries: Knorrbräu on Briennerstraße, Oberkandler and Unterkandler, both on Neuhauser Straße, and Singelspieler on Sendlinger Straße. Even beer from further away was brought to Theresienwiese and served there, such as from Tölz, South of Munich, and Hesselloher Bier, which was likely from the brewery in Großhesselohe in Pullach just outside Munich, but that’s not entirely clear from the source.

From an 1824 painting by Heinrich Adam, we can also get a rough idea how serving beer used to be organised like, on a much smaller scale than nowadays, from wooden shacks like this one:

Detail from an 1824 painting by Heinrich Adam, depicting beer getting served from a cask at Oktoberfest. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.

(header image by Heinrich Adam, 1824, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. source)

History

Top- vs. Bottom-Fermenting Breweries in Prussia 1889/1890

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In my recent article about top- vs bottom-fermenting breweries in Germany 1889/1890, I simplified one bit of the data: I lumped together all provinces of Prussia, when the data was actually much more detailed specifically for that state.

So let’s start with the per-province data:

BreweriesProduction volume [hl]
No.ProvinceTFBFTFBF
1East Prussia19952328,721582,580
2West Prussia4260172,278419,883
3Brandenburg4441251,839,7802,876,476
4Pomerania23582126,654531,615
5Posen11351218,544270,509
6Silesia6541991,128,1731,534,086
7Saxony465174646,9871,791,947
8Schleswig-Holstein65353282,954952,226
9Hanover355110155,4361,001,521
10Westphalia468248101,8832,000,935
11Hesse-Nassau9031228,4041,613,806
12Rhineland7833711,030,2832,527,309
13Hohenzollern931464,659117,557
List of provinces, with the number of breweries (TF = top-fermenting, BF = bottom-fermenting) and respective production volumes

I added numbers to give you a better idea where each of these provinces were located using this map:

Map of Imperial Germany, with Prussia marked green and the Prussian provinces number 1-13. This map was created using this map. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The original map was created by Maps & Lucy and others.

Now let’s again look at the ratio of bottom- to top-fermenting breweries per province:

No.RegionBF / TF
1East Prussia0.26
2West Prussia1.43
3Brandenburg0.28
4Pomerania0.35
5Posen0.45
6Silesia0.30
7Saxony0.37
8Schleswig-Holstein0.08
9Hanover0.31
10Westphalia0.53
11Hesse-Nassau3.47
12Rhineland0.47
13Hohenzollern1.57
List of the provinces and the ratio of bottom- to top-fermenting breweries in each of them

The first thing I noticed is that there are only three provinces with more bottom-fermenting than top-fermenting breweries: West Prussia, Hesse-Nassau and Hohenzollern. When you look at the raw data, West Prussia in general didn’t seem to have too many breweries in the first place. Hesse-Nassau, just like the State of Hesse (which it fully surrounds), also seems to have switched over to bottom fermentation, but not quite to the extent as Hesse. And then there’s Hohenzollern, which is actually quite separate from the rest of Prussia and located very much in the South of Germany where bottom fermentation has a more longstanding tradition.

This brings me to the next table of statistics, the average production volumes per province, divided between top- and bottom-fermenting breweries:

hl / Brewery
No.RegionTFBFBF / TF
1East Prussia1,651.8611,203.466.78
2West Prussia4,101.866,998.051.71
3Brandenburg4,143.6523,011.815.55
4Pomerania538.956,483.1112.03
5Posen1,934.025,304.102.74
6Silesia1,725.047,708.974.47
7Saxony1,391.3710,298.557.40
8Schleswig-Holstein433.3117,966.5341.46
9Hanover437.859,104.7420.79
10Westphalia217.708,068.2937.06
11Hesse-Nassau315.605,172.4616.39
12Rhineland1,315.816,812.155.18
13Hohenzollern50.10805.1816.07
The list of Prussian provinces, each with the average hl / Brewery for top- and bottom-fermenting breweries, plus the ratio of bottom- to top-fermenting average production volume.

Hohenzollern absolutely stands out here, with just tiny average production volumes. Whatever top-fermenting breweries existed there, they must have been pretty small in operation (at least on average), some of them probably glorified home-brewing operations. But even the bottom-fermenting breweries were really small compared to all the other provinces.

The brewery structure of Hohenzollern (but this is just an educated guess) was probably closer to regions like Franconia, where a lot of small, local breweries were established and just served a very local market, with relatively little industrialisation at the time.

Brandenburg (which includes Berlin) seems to have been the exact opposite, not only because it had a fairly strong top-fermenting brewing industry with a pretty large number of breweries and strong average production volumes, but also had by far the largest production volumes for bottom-fermenting breweries. These number probably mostly reflect the Berlin brewing industry: a large number of breweries making Berliner Weisse and other top-fermented beers for a market that is strong but slowly declining on the one hand, and large, industrial breweries specifically founded and built for brewing fashionable bottom-fermented beers on the other hand.

Interestingly, the Rhineland, nowadays very well known for its hyperlocal top-fermented beer cultures of Kölsch (in Cologne and surrounding areas) and Altbier (in Düsseldorf and the Lower Rhine region), does not particularly stand out as much as I would have expected. While it is the province with the third-largest total production volume of top-fermented beers in Prussia, when ranked by average production volume per brewery, it can only be found on seventh place. When looking at total bottom-fermented volume, the Rhineland is even number 2 of all provinces, but at the same time also has by far the largest number of bottom-fermenting breweries, which brings down the average production volume a lot.

It does show though that in the Rhineland, beer was an important product with presumably one of the highest per-capita consumption in all of Prussia. At least the large number of breweries would suggest a focus on the local market and a comparatively less consolidated beer market overall.