A brewhouse that outlasted the town’s fires.

Schremser is brewed in Schrems, a small town in the Waldviertel, the wooded granite upland in the north-west of Lower Austria, close to the Czech border. The company dates the first documentary mention of the brewery to 1410, and German Wikipedia ties that date to a fire in Schrems that spared only the brewhouse; German Wikipedia also gives 1380 as the founding year. The company says the old brewhouse survived the town’s fires and is the oldest building in Schrems, and German Wikipedia records it as a protected monument, no longer used for brewing. In 2010 the brewery marked 600 years of Schremser beer with a year of celebrations, the company says.

The brewery passed through several hands before the family that still owns it. According to the company’s history, the lord of the manor, Count Falkenhayn, sold the brewhouse to Blasius Freyler in 1753; Johann Anderl bought it in 1764 and passed it to his son, and Wolfgang Wagner bought it in 1811. On 27 June 1838, the company says, Jakob Trojan bought the brewery, and English and German Wikipedia both date the Trojan family’s ownership to 1838. In June 2018 the family celebrated 180 years in charge.

Each generation is tied to a stage in the building. In 1875 Theodor Trojan took over from his father, built a new storage cellar and, the company says, brewed bottom-fermented lager for the first time; English Wikipedia says he installed a steam engine that year. Between 1904 and 1906 he built a new brewery on the present site, which opened in 1906 and, German Wikipedia says, is still in use. His son Karl Theodor Trojan took over in 1907 and kept the business going through two world wars and the depression, the company says, and in 1957 Karl Johann Trojan took over and modernised it. Since 1991 the brewery has been owned by Karl Theodor Trojan, the present head of the family; the company speaks of five generations of the family living for beer.

Waldviertel barley, rye and a pils in a new dress.

Schremser builds its story on its region. The company says the Waldviertel’s granite soil gives very soft water that suits brewing without treatment, and that its beers use aroma hops from the neighbouring Mühlviertel in Upper Austria. In 1995, it says, the brewery founded the Erzeugergemeinschaft Ökoregion Waldviertel, a growers’ association whose farmers follow the brewery’s cultivation rules, and since then its brewing barley has come only from checked farms in the Waldviertel.

Organic beer followed. The company says it has been certified under the Austria Bio Garantie scheme since 2006, and its history dates its entry into organic production to 2007. Its organic beers include Schremser Roggen, a top-fermented rye beer that the company says created a new Austrian beer style, and an unfiltered organic Zwickl.

The range runs from a pale Schremser Premium lager and a Märzen to a dark Doppelmalz and strong seasonal beers for Easter and Christmas. Unfiltered Zwickl beers, among them a Kellerpils and a hemp beer, sit alongside them. The company singles out one beer for its look: it says the Schremser Ostarrichi Pils “set new standards in beer design.” The brewery also says it fills only glass, mainly returnable bottles that can be reused up to ten times, and that its roofs carry solar panels.

The brewery describes its methods as craft brewing with modern equipment: it says a brewer, rather than central computer control, still runs the brewhouse, and that fermentation takes place cold and slowly in its own fermenting cellar before weeks of maturation. English Wikipedia says the beer is brewed to the purity standard of 1516 and checked in the brewery’s laboratory.

The company says Schremser beers are sold in Austria, the Czech Republic, Britain, China and Japan. At home it runs brewery tours and tastings in Schrems.

Austrian beer and its owners.

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 family brewery that wears its independence on the label.

Independence is now part of the brand’s packaging. In September 2021 a group of Austrian private breweries — among them Stiegl, Ottakringer, Murauer, Zwettler, Trumer and Schremser — launched the association Unabhängige Privatbrauereien and a seal reading “Österreichische Privatbrauerei – 100% unabhängig” (“Austrian private brewery – 100% independent”), Salzburg24 reported, quoting the Schremser head Karl Trojan. Schremser says the seal now appears on all its beers and packs, under the motto “für immer konzernfrei,” “group-free for ever,” and that members must be based in Austria and free of foreign corporate control.

The brewery belongs to two other alliances. It is a member of the CulturBrauer, a group of eight Austrian family breweries that includes Murauer, Trumer, Hirter, Mohren, Zwettler, Freistädter and Schloss Eggenberg; the group brews a shared amber Austrian Lager and sells mixed boxes of its members’ beers, the company says. German Wikipedia adds that it belongs to the Brauring, a cooperative of private breweries from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The company today is Bierbrauerei Schrems GmbH, which brews in Schrems and has been owned since 1991 by Karl Theodor Trojan.

For a design guide, Schremser shows how a small family brewery can turn its age, its region and its independence into visual signals. Compare Stiegl and Ottakringer, two larger founding members of the same independent breweries’ association. For this guide we use a brewhouse red, forest green and rye gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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