A Lorraine paint maker’s children and a brewery on Calle Amaniel.

The name on the label is a French surname. Spanish Wikipedia, citing the business historian José Luis García Ruiz’s company history Cervezas Mahou 1890–1998, says Casimiro Mahou came from Metz in Lorraine, married in Madrid and ran a business making wallpaper, paints and varnishes there. The business later passed to his widow and children, who added ice to its paints and varnishes. It was those children who turned it into a brewery, which is why the company was called Hijos de Casimiro Mahou — “the sons of Casimiro Mahou.”

Spanish Wikipedia, drawing on the same history and on a document published by the Community of Madrid’s regional archive in 2015, says the partnership was formed on 30 October 1889 by the siblings Alfredo, Enrique, Luis and Carolina Mahou Solana; English Wikipedia names Enrique, Luis and Carolina and dates the founding to 1890, the year the company itself uses. In May 1890 the firm was selling bars of ice in Madrid. It then hired a German brewmaster, Konrad Stauffer, and built a brewery at Calle Amaniel 29, near the Conde-Duque barracks, which started work on 1 February 1891; beer went on sale that March. From the start it brewed a Pilsen-type beer, Spanish Wikipedia says, with German equipment, imported German hops and Spanish malt.

Beer soon overtook the older lines. The firm stopped making paints and varnishes in the early twentieth century but kept making ice into the 1970s. In 1904 it opened a second brewery at Gibraleón, in Huelva, to supply the mining towns there; it closed in 1912. Under Casimiro Mahou García, who also presided over Madrid’s Chamber of Commerce, the company replaced cork stoppers with crown caps in 1922, and Spanish Wikipedia says the caps came in two colours: blue for the Munich type and red for the Pilsen. In 1943, English Wikipedia says, his son Alfredo Mahou de la Fuente took charge.

A new brewery, a litre bottle and a five-star beer.

The company became a public limited company, Mahou S.A., in 1957, according to both English and Spanish Wikipedia. Demand for beer rose sharply in Spain in the 1960s, and Mahou built a second Madrid brewery on the Paseo Imperial, which made its first brew on 15 May 1962, during the San Isidro festivities, Spanish Wikipedia says. The old Amaniel plant later closed; the building now houses the Museo ABC, a museum of drawing and illustration.

Packaging became part of the story in these years. Spanish Wikipedia, citing García Ruiz, says Mahou was the first Spanish company to replace wooden casks with aluminium kegs, and that in 1966 it introduced a one-litre bottle, the litrona, to cut packing costs. In 1969 it launched Mahou Cinco Estrellas, a Pilsen-style lager sold in one-third-litre bottles, which Spanish Wikipedia credits to the brewing engineer Antonio Nolasco Fernández, working with the German brewmaster Otto Greil. Spanish Wikipedia also says it was among the first Spanish beers sold in cans. Spanish Wikipedia calls Cinco Estrellas the company’s flagship, and the original 1890 recipe has been sold as Mahou Clásica since 1993.

The brand already had a place in Madrid’s visual culture. Spanish Wikipedia notes that a large Mahou bottle with a red label sits on the table in José Gutiérrez Solana’s 1920 painting of the literary gathering at the Café de Pombo. English Wikipedia says Mahou ran its first television advertisement in 1984. Work began on a new brewery at Alovera, in the province of Guadalajara, in 1990, and Spanish Wikipedia says it packed its first beer in 1993; production moved there from the Paseo Imperial over the following years, and the Paseo Imperial plant was demolished in 2011.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make drinks, and all of them come from Sweden, Belgium or Spain: Pripps, Ramlösa, Jupiler, Estrella Damm, Mahou, Cruzcampo and Kas. 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 brewing and beverage groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner bar to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a label, a name and the occasion it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewery or bottling plant 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 drinks are actually brewed, bottled 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 drinks are made and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Danone, San Miguel and a family-owned group.

The modern group was built around one purchase. In the 1950s the Spanish San Miguel brewery was set up under an agreement with the Philippine San Miguel company, and it produced its first San Miguel Especial in Lleida in 1957, English Wikipedia says. By the 1990s the French food group Danone held a third of Mahou and was buying control of San Miguel. In 2000 Mahou bought 70% of San Miguel from Danone, adding to the 30% it already held, and the combined company became Grupo Mahou-San Miguel, described by English and Spanish Wikipedia as a wholly Spanish-owned brewing group. It shortened its name to Mahou San Miguel in 2014. The company is still headquartered in Madrid.

The group has since grown by acquisition. Spanish Wikipedia lists Cervezas Anaga, maker of Reina in Tenerife, in 2004; Granada’s Cervezas Alhambra in 2007; the mineral-water company Solán de Cabras in 2011; and the Indian brewer Arian Breweries & Distilleries, half in 2012 and the rest in 2014. In the United States it took 30% of Founders Brewing of Grand Rapids in 2014 and a majority in 2019, and 30% of Avery Brewing of Boulder in 2017, raising that to 70% in 2019, English Wikipedia says. Spanish Wikipedia lists the group’s breweries at Alovera, Burgos, Candelaria, Córdoba, Granada, Lleida and Málaga, plus springs at Beteta and a brewery at Bhiwadi in India; Mahou’s Madrid production moved to Alovera in the 1990s.

For a design guide, Mahou shows how a family surname, a five-star name and a red label can carry a city brewery from ice bars to a national group. Compare Cruzcampo, Seville’s Heineken-owned rival, and Estrella Damm, Barcelona’s star-branded lager. For this guide we use a caña red, a foam cream and a star gold with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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