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.
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.
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.
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.
Year
10° Beer
13° Lager Beer
Combined
1847
4,500 (2,546)
3,000 (1,698)
7,500 (4,244)
1850
4,900 (2,773)
6,240 (3,531)
11,140 (6,304)
1855
5,148 (2,913)
12,776 (7,230)
17,924 (10,143)
1860
2,304 (1,304)
26,976 (15,265)
29,280 (16,569)
1865
1,336 (756)
35,648 (20,173)
36,984 (20,929)
1870
1,200 (679)
51,000 (28,860)
52,200 (29,539)
1871
3,750 (2,122)
47,850 (27,078)
51,600 (29,200)
1872
1,600 (905)
64,000 (36,217)
65,600 (37,122)
1873
3,000 (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.
Year
Amount
1866
2,726 (1,542)
1867
5,190 (2,937)
1868
7,800 (4,414)
1869
8,000 (4,527)
1870
8,280 (4,685)
1871
10,600 (5,998)
1872
14,360 (8,126)
1873
17,000 (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:
Year
Amount
1847
7,500 (4,244)
1857
24,200 (13,694)
1867
34,000 (19,240)
1871
51,600 (29,200)
1872
65,000 (36,783)
1873
82,300 (46,573)
1874
81,600 (46,177)
1875
80,100 (45,328)
1876
73,900 (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:
Year
Amount
1867
5,200 (2,943)
1870
8,200 (4,640)
1871
10,600 (5,998)
1872
14,360 (8,126)
1873
15,560 (8,805)
1874
16,300 (9,224)
1875
18,170 (10,282)
1876
15,000 (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
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.
you search the archive for what you want to look up using this search form.
If a document exists in digitised form, you can just read it online.
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.
For every reference number, fill out this form separately.
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.
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 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.
