A brewhouse on the lions’ den street.

Löwenbräu, “lion’s brew,” traces its brewing to 1524. The company’s own timeline begins that year, when “Jörg Schnaitter, pierprew,” a beer brewer, is recorded at Löwengrube 17 in Munich, on a street whose name means “lions’ den.” The Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, in a 2017 entry by the historian Richard Winkler, says brewing ran without a break in that house from 1524, and that the founding year 1383, repeated since 1913, is incorrect; German Wikipedia, citing a 1999 history of Munich’s brewing industry by Christian Schäder, takes the same view. The name Löwenbräu first appears in the city’s brewing register in 1746, German Wikipedia and the company say. German Wikipedia adds that the lion comes from a seventeenth-century fresco of Daniel in the lions’ den in the old brewhouse.

The modern business starts with Georg Brey, a brewer who bought the Löwenbrauerei in 1818. In 1817, the lexicon says, it ranked 37th of Munich’s 63 breweries. Brey moved brewing step by step from the cramped Löwengrube to new premises on Nymphenburger Straße, a move his son Ludwig Brey completed in 1851, and by 1849–50 Löwenbräu was the city’s largest brewer. In 1848, the company says, Georg Brey won permission to brew a bock beer.

After a quality crisis from 1866, Ludwig Brey sold the business in 1872 to a new joint-stock company, the first in Munich’s brewing trade, the lexicon says. The Löwenbräukeller, the beer hall beside the brewery built to plans by Albert Schmidt, opened on 14 June 1883, and in 1886 the lion was registered as a trademark, German Wikipedia and the company say. By 1894 Löwenbräu had become the largest brewery in the German Empire, a position it held until 1898, according to the lexicon.

Export, a roaring lion and the Oktoberfest.

Löwenbräu became an export name early. The Historisches Lexikon Bayerns says it became a world brand in the 1880s, shipping beer across Europe and, from 1893, to the United States, and that in 1912 it ranked second among German beer exporters behind Beck’s of Bremen. At the 1900 Paris world’s fair its beer won a Grand Prix, German Wikipedia and the company say. Archive material reproduced by the lexicon shows how the brand was sold: a metal sign of around 1900, a bock label of around 1910, a 1923 advertisement reading “Kein Erdteil ohne Münchner Löwenbräu” (“no continent without Munich Löwenbräu”) and, around 1965, an advertisement calling it “the champagne among beers.” German Wikipedia also shows a poster of around 1925 by the artist Siegmund von Suchodolski.

Mergers in 1921 brought in the Unionsbrauerei Schülein and the Bürgerbräu. Under Hermann Schülein, general director from 1924, the brewery began making wheat beer in 1927 and passed one million hectolitres a year, the lexicon says. After the Second World War, the company says, exports resumed in 1948 with Switzerland, and in 1950 a mechanical lion above the Löwenbräu tent roared for the first time at the Oktoberfest; a ban on the roaring imposed in September 1952 was lifted in 1954. From 1952, according to the lexicon, Löwenbräu was the most-drunk imported beer brand in the United States, and in 1963 it became Germany’s leading beer exporter.

Licensing followed. The company says it signed its first licence agreements with the United States and England in 1974; the lexicon dates the switch to licence brewing by Miller in the United States to 1977. German Wikipedia, citing Die Zeit in 1984, says that of about four million hectolitres of Löwenbräu sold worldwide in 1983, about two-thirds was brewed by licence partners abroad. From 1999, it says, the beer was brewed under licence by Labatt in Canada.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all beer names from Germany, Belgium and the United States: Franziskaner, Spaten, Löwenbräu, Leffe, Hoegaarden, Westmalle and Yuengling. German, Belgian and American beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger brewing groups, and a single brand can be poured everywhere from a local bar to a supermarket shelf.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a label, a glass, a name and the place it claims as home, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing 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 beer is actually brewed 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 beer is brewed and how its labels and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Brey family to Spaten and AB InBev.

Löwenbräu’s independence ended in the 1990s. The Historisches Lexikon Bayerns says the investor August von Finck Jr. built up control of about 90 per cent of the shares after 1982 and split off much of the brewery’s large property holdings. Output fell from 1.42 to 1 million hectolitres between 1990 and 1997, a period in which, the lexicon says, a costly and misjudged new brand appearance included a change of the traditional house colour from Bavarian blue to turquoise. In 1997 the neighbouring Spaten brewery took over, forming the Spaten-Löwenbräu group; in 2003 the Belgian brewer Interbrew acquired both, and in 2004 Interbrew merged with AmBev to form InBev. The company dates the group’s membership of InBev to 1 October 2004. Since 2008, the lexicon says, Löwenbräu has been one local brand in the portfolio of Anheuser-Busch InBev; German Wikipedia adds that marketing and sales have been run since 2007 from the group’s German head office at Beck’s in Bremen.

The beer is still brewed in Munich. German Wikipedia says the remaining brewhouse on the old Löwenbräu site, run under lease by Spaten-Franziskaner-Bräu, brews the group’s beers, among them Spaten, Franziskaner, Löwenbräu and Beck’s, after the Spaten brewhouse closed in 2005; the Löwenbräu AG itself operates as a leased business without staff of its own. The range includes an Original, a Dunkel, an Oktoberfestbier and the Triumphator strong beer, which the company says returned in the early 1920s. Löwenbräu is one of the Munich breweries at the Oktoberfest, where German Wikipedia says it supplies the Löwenbräu-Festzelt and the Schützenfestzelt. In 2016 Löwenbräu Original won gold in the Munich-style Helles category at the World Beer Cup, German Wikipedia says, citing the competition’s winners list.

For a design guide, Löwenbräu shows how a street name, a registered lion and a house blue can carry a Munich brewery through five centuries and several owners. Compare Spaten, its partner since 1997, and Franziskaner, the wheat beer brewed in the same Munich brewhouse. For this guide we use a Bavarian blue, a lion gold and a cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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