Five centuries of brewing in one Styrian town, and a cooperative since 1910.

Murauer is the beer of Brauerei Murau, a brewery in the small town of Murau on the river Mur in Upper Styria, Austria. The date on which the brand rests is 1495. The Austrian online encyclopaedia Austria-Forum, in its entry on the town, says that brewing began in Murau in 1495 at the brewery that still exists there today, and that the brewery has been run as a cooperative since 1910. The brewery tells the same story on its own website: beer has been brewed in Murau since 1495, and the business has been a cooperative since 1910. There is no single named founder; 1495 marks the start of brewing at the site, not the work of one family.

Who owns it is the centre of the brand. The brewery’s 2013 environmental statement describes Brauerei Murau eGen as a cooperative of publicans and merchants based in Murau, and records that in 2011 the company changed its long official name, 1. Obermurtaler Brauereigenossenschaft in Murau, to the simpler Brauerei Murau eGen. The brewery’s own mission statement puts it more plainly: it says it belongs to no international group of companies and instead “belongs to its region.” Its website names Josef Rieberer as managing member of the board.

The town and the brewery grew up together. The municipal utility Stadtwerke Murau says in its company chronicle that in 1906 the town decided to build a hydroelectric power station, chiefly to supply the brewery with electricity, and that the plant was completed with three turbines in 1907 and 1908. The brewery says that since 2014 it has brewed with heat from the same utility’s biomass district-heating plant.

Brown glass, a cooperative stance and a vampire on the lemonade.

Much of what shapes Murauer’s look is packaging rather than a single emblem. The brewery’s 2013 environmental statement records that in 2011 it switched its 0.33-litre returnable bottles from green to brown glass, and that discarded labels rose for a time because of a layout changeover on its labels. The brewery says today that about 96 per cent of its containers are returnable and that it is one of the few bottlers in Austria to put its lemonades in returnable glass too.

The range is broad but built on a few core beers. The best known is the Murauer Märzen, alongside a Pils, a Weissbier and a Bockbier that German Wikipedia says is delivered only before Christmas. German Wikipedia also lists radler blends, among them Preisel&Bier, mixed with cranberry lemonade.

The most playful design work sits on the soft drinks. Since 2019 the brewery has sold lemonades under the name Murelli, German Wikipedia notes, each with a character name. The Viennese weekly Falter reviewed the cola, Murelli Dracola, in July 2019: it described a black-and-white Murelli label on which Count Dracula sips through a straw, praised the simple but appealing design of the long-necked 0.33-litre bottle, and called the eight lemonades then in the range lovingly designed and inventive in their names and flavours.

The cooperative structure has also become a mark in its own right. Leadersnet reported on 21 September 2021 that ten Austrian breweries, the Brauerei Murau among them, had formed the association Unabhängige Privatbrauereien Österreichs (Independent Private Breweries of Austria), whose seal identifies companies wholly in Austrian ownership. The magazine framed the group as a counterweight to Brau Union, the Austrian arm of Heineken.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are Austrian and Swiss beers: Puntigamer, Schremser and Murauer from Austria, and Feldschlösschen, Calanda, Appenzeller Bier and Eichhof from Switzerland. Their ownership runs from global brewing groups to families and a cooperative. German Wikipedia records that Puntigamer’s Graz brewery is part of Brau Union Österreich, which Heineken has owned since 2003; that Heineken has owned Calanda in Chur since 1993 and Eichhof in Lucerne since 2008; and that Carlsberg has owned Feldschlösschen in Rheinfelden since 2000.

The others are independent. German Wikipedia says the Brauerei Schrems in the Waldviertel has belonged to the Trojan family since the nineteenth century, that the Brauerei Murau in Styria has been a cooperative since 1910, and that both were among the founding members of an association of Austria’s independent private breweries in 2021. Appenzeller Bier is made by the Brauerei Locher in Appenzell, a family company; the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says Johann Christoph Locher began brewing beer in Appenzell in 1886.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried by a label, a crest or an emblem and the town it names, because the company behind it may have changed hands or moved some of its production elsewhere. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the brewery says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and bottled and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A regional brewery that makes its ownership part of its story.

The other members of that 2021 association give Murauer its peers. Leadersnet listed Ottakringer in Vienna, Stiegl in Salzburg, Hirt in Carinthia, the Braucommune in Freistadt, the Mohrenbrauerei in Vorarlberg, Schloss Eggenberg, Trumer, Zwettl and the Waldviertel brewery behind Schremser. The association’s motto, the magazine reported, is “für immer konzernfrei” (forever free of corporate groups). Murauer’s own twist is that it is owned not by a family but by a cooperative whose members, its 2013 statement says, are publicans and merchants.

Environmental work is the other strand the brewery puts forward. Austria’s environment ministry, in an information leaflet on the EU’s EMAS eco-management scheme, describes the Brauerei Murau as having been an EMAS-registered business for almost 30 years and quotes its environmental manager. The brewery says it was the first EMAS-registered company in Austria, that it has carried the AMA quality seal for its brewing barley since 2010, and that since 2021 it has grown its own brewing barley in the Murtal, which it says now covers around 70 per cent of its malt.

Visitors meet the brand in the town itself. The brewery runs a visitor centre it calls the Brauerei der Sinne (brewery of the senses), with a shop, and says Murau has styled itself a beer town since 2010.

The name needs a little care online. Murau is also the name of the town and the surrounding district, so the brewery’s own site is murauerbier.at.

For a design guide, Murauer shows how a regional brewery can turn its ownership, its returnable glass and a cast of lemonade characters into a recognisable identity without a famous emblem at its centre. Compare Stiegl, the Salzburg private brewery, and Schremser, its fellow member from Lower Austria. For this guide we use Mur valley green, deep pine and Märzen gold with a sturdy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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