Nuns, a 1459 deed and a revival in 1860.

Gösser is the beer of Göss, now part of the town of Leoben in Styria, Austria, and the brand’s story begins with a convent. Around the year 1000, German Wikipedia and the company both say, a noblewoman, Countess Adala, founded Göss Abbey on farmland beside the river Mur, and the nuns brewed beer there. A brewer at the convent named Lenhart Newmaister appears in a deed of 1459, which German and English Wikipedia treat as the first documented brewing at Göss. The abbey was dissolved in 1782 under the Josephinist reforms of Emperor Joseph II.

Brewing returned in 1860. That year Max Kober, a 28-year-old master brewer whom German Wikipedia places at the Saybusch brewery, today’s Żywiec in Poland, bought parts of the former abbey and revived its brewery, German Wikipedia says, against the wishes of the local council. The company calls 1860 an important year for Gösser and says it is still printed on its labels.

Growth was quick. German Wikipedia puts output at about 70,000 hectolitres by 1892. In 1893 Kober turned the business into a joint-stock company, and in 1894 it bought the Sixt brewery in Leoben and merged with the Farrach brewery, whose major shareholders included the financier Leopold Löwy. Over the next fifteen years, German Wikipedia lists, the company bought breweries across Styria and Carinthia, supplied beer to workers building the Karawanken, Tauern and Pyhrn railways, and in 1911 bought the Göss abbey buildings. Löwy led the company as chairman after Kober and was made an honorary citizen of Göss in 1923.

In 1921 the company bought the Falkenstein brewery in Lienz, in East Tyrol, and the same year it took a stake in the Zipf brewery, the brewer of Zipfer, German Wikipedia says.

Crown corks, a treaty dinner and a slogan.

Gösser went abroad early. In the 1920s, the company says, pasteurisation and crown corks allowed it to sell its beer beyond Austria; on its international page it describes the first use of crown corks in Austria as Gösser’s own. In 1933 the company received the Austrian state award, the Staatliche Auszeichnung, which allows it to use the federal coat of arms in its business, German Wikipedia says. Today the company calls Gösser the best-known Austrian beer brand on the international market and lists countries from Albania and Canada to Japan, New Zealand and Sweden.

One date is central to the brand’s telling of itself. On 15 May 1955 Austria signed the State Treaty that restored its independence, and the company says Gösser Spezial was served at the gala dinner held for the signing. German Wikipedia adds that a special bottling marked the treaty’s 50th anniversary in 2005. A later footnote is literary: in his introduction to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, Douglas Adams wrote that the idea came to him in 1971 while he lay in a field in Innsbruck after “a couple of stiff Gössers.”

The range, as German Wikipedia lists it, includes Märzen; Gold, Spezial and Stiftsbräu, from Stift, the German word for an abbey; Bock; light and dark Zwickl; the Naturradler and Kräuterradler; and alcohol-free Naturgold and Kracherl. For the 2013 Alpine Ski World Championships in Schladming, Styria, the brewery made a one-off Gösser WM-Gold.

The slogan is “Gut. Besser. Gösser.” (“Good. Better. Gösser.”), which runs across the company’s website today, alongside the claim “Österreichs bestes Bier,” Austria’s best beer. The company says it brews with water from its own protected spring area, barley from Austrian farmers and hops from Leutschach, in southern Styria. At the brewery, the Gösseum museum and visitor centre, developed with the Linz media-art centre Ars Electronica, tells the story with historic exhibits.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Austria or Switzerland: Zipfer, Gösser, Inzersdorfer, Rivella, Emmi, Kägi and Rauch. Austrian and Swiss food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Kober’s company to Heineken.

Gösser’s independence ended in stages. German Wikipedia says output passed one million hectolitres in 1973, and in 1977 the brewery joined the Steirerbrau group, which also took in the Graz brewers Puntigamer and Reininghaus. In the early 1990s that Styrian group came under the control of its rival, the Österreichische Brau-Beteiligungs AG, or BBAG; English Wikipedia dates the merger to 1991, while German Wikipedia’s Göss article gives 1992. German Wikipedia’s Brau Union article says that in 1993 the group’s beer business was gathered into the Gösser Brauerei AG, which was renamed Brau Union AG.

In 1998 the Österreichische Brau AG and Steirerbrau merged into Brau Union Österreich, Austria’s largest brewer, with its headquarters in Linz, and in 2003 Heineken took over Brau Union. The company says that since then it has belonged to the Heineken group, with its head office in Amsterdam. Gösser is still brewed at Göss, and German Wikipedia describes it as the best-known product of a large, long-established brewery in Leoben.

Brand perception has been studied: a 2013 master’s thesis at the University of Applied Sciences in Steyr compared how consumers saw Gösser and Zipfer, two single brands of Brau Union Österreich. The company runs its social channels under the slogan, as gutbessergoesser.

For a design guide, Gösser shows how a beer can carry a founding date, a former abbey and a three-word slogan through more than a century and several changes of owner. Compare Zipfer, its Upper Austrian stablemate in Brau Union, and Darbo, another Austrian family-founded food brand. For this guide we use Styrian green, cream and amber with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gösser’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.