A 1397 brewer, the Spatt family and the Sedlmayrs.

Spaten counts its history from 1397. That year, the company and German Wikipedia say, Munich’s city tax book first records a brewer at Neuhausergasse 4, Hans Welser, the “Welser Prew.” Ownership changed often for more than a century; the Starnberger family held the brewery from 1522 to 1622, and the Spatt family, owners from 1622 to 1704, gave it the name it still carries. “Spaten” is also the German word for a spade, and English Wikipedia notes that the brand’s symbol is a malt shovel. The Sießmayr family, the last owners before 1807, kept the name.

In 1807 the royal court brewmaster Gabriel Sedlmayr the Elder bought Spaten, then the smallest brewery in Munich, the company says. In 1817 the brewery bought the Filserbräukeller on Bayerstraße, which became the Spaten-Keller. In 1839 his sons Gabriel the Younger and Joseph took over; Joseph left the partnership in 1842 to run the Leist brewery, and later Franziskaner. Spaten bought a greenfield site on Marsstraße in 1851 and had moved the whole brewery there by 1854. By 1867 it was the largest brewery in Munich, a position German Wikipedia says it held into the 1890s. In 1874 Gabriel the Younger’s sons Johann, Carl and Anton took over, and the family’s shareholders still owned the group when it was sold in 2003, Getränke News reported in 2020, adding that the family kept the property holdings.

Lager science, Helles and a 1924 rhyme.

Spaten’s place in brewing history rests on the nineteenth century. German Wikipedia says the beer writer Michael Jackson considered it, for its innovations in that period, the most important brewery in the history of lager. Spaten backed the installation in 1821 of what German Wikipedia calls the only steam engine in Bavaria at the time, and in 1873 it supported Carl Linde’s development of the first refrigeration machine to work reliably over time, the company says. The Oxford Companion to Beer, cited by English Wikipedia, dates Spaten’s Märzen to 1841.

Its best-known style came in 1894. According to the company, the first Münchner Hell left the brewery on 21 March 1894, making Spaten the first Munich brewery to brew a pale lager of that kind; it was meant at first for shipping to northern Germany and went on sale in Munich the following year, German Wikipedia says. In 2019, 125 years on, Spaten Hell returned to a classic bottle, the company says. The brewery had opened a London branch in 1891 and from 1909 exported regularly to America.

Two pieces of the identity are older than most of the beers. The company and German Wikipedia say the logo still in use was designed in 1884 by the graphic artist Otto Hupp, and that the rhyming slogan “Lass Dir raten, trinke Spaten,” roughly “take some advice, drink Spaten,” dates from 1924; English Wikipedia says it is still in use, and it still appears on the company’s website. In 1926 the brewery launched a beer later named Vollmalz, and at the 1964 Oktoberfest it introduced its first wheat beer, the Champagner-Weiße.

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 Sedlmayrs to Spaten-Löwenbräu to AB InBev.

The twentieth century brought mergers. In 1922 Spaten merged with the Sedlmayr family’s other brewery, Franziskaner-Leist-Bräu, and in the same year agreed a community-of-interest arrangement with Löwenbräu. Allied bombing of Munich in 1943–1945 badly damaged the brewery, and exports to the rest of Europe and overseas resumed only in 1950, German Wikipedia says. Spaten passed one million hectolitres a year in 1992.

In 1997 Spaten and its neighbour Löwenbräu combined as the Spaten-Löwenbräu-Gruppe, and in 2003 the group was taken over by the Belgian brewer Interbrew, whose successor is AB InBev, as the company and the Süddeutsche Zeitung record. The Munich paper tz reported in 2010 that the group had about 500 employees and brewed about 2.4 million hectolitres a year. In 2006 the historic brewhouse on Marsstraße was closed and became a visitor museum. In April 2026 the Abendzeitung reported that Spaten, Löwenbräu and Franziskaner are all brewed at the Marsstraße site, where the brewery now uses artificial intelligence to time cleaning and process steps. English Wikipedia lists Spaten-Franziskaner-Bräu among the six Munich brewers that brew beer for the Oktoberfest.

The brand travels further than its home city. The company says Spaten is sold today in Western Europe, the United States, Japan and New Zealand, and the brewery dates its history pages back to the 1397 tax record, calling its quality more than six centuries old. Ownership has not changed since the Interbrew deal, although in October 2021 Bloomberg reported that AB InBev was exploring a sale of several German brands, among them Spaten and Franziskaner. The 2026 Abendzeitung report still described the Spaten brewery as part of the Belgian group, and the brand’s own website credits Spaten-Franziskaner-Bräu GmbH, the Munich company that also produces Franziskaner.

For a design guide, Spaten shows a mark and a slogan that have outlasted most of the beers around them: a logo from 1884 and a rhyme from 1924. Compare its sister brands Franziskaner and Löwenbräu. For this guide we use spade red, Hell green and malt gold with a Caslon-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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