Antonius Cramer, a house brewery and a town fire.

Warsteiner dates itself to 1753, the year a farmer in Warstein, in the Sauerland hills of Westphalia, first paid tax on beer he brewed and sold. The company says the record is in the annals of the Warstein town administration, and names the farmer as Antonius Cramer, who brewed as a sideline to farming. German Wikipedia gives the same year and the same name, and English Wikipedia quotes Inc. magazine on the farmer Antonius Cramer laying “the foundation for a German beer dynasty.” The brewery has stayed with the Cramer family ever since.

For its first century and a half it was a house brewery attached to the family home. German Wikipedia says Antonius’s son Johannes Vitus took over the brewing and sold beer from the house in the centre of town. In December 1802 a fire destroyed much of Warstein, the Cramer house included. The family rebuilt on the same spot as an inn with its own brewery, and that building, now known as the Domschänke, still stands in the old core of the town, near the St. Pankratius church. The company’s own history puts the rebuilding in 1803.

Later generations learned the trade formally. German Wikipedia says that from 1823 Albert and August Cramer ran the brewery after training at the brewing school in Worms. The railway reached the town on 31 October 1883, when the line from Münster to Warstein opened, and freight wagons let the beer travel far beyond the range of the horse-drawn carts that had carried it until then. In the 1890s the brewery installed its first steam engine, and by 1920, German Wikipedia says, it was also bottling lemonades and table water alongside Pils and Bock beer.

A soft-water spring and a brewery in the forest.

The decision that shaped the modern brand came at the end of the 1920s. German Wikipedia says Albert Cramer found the Kaiserquelle spring at Kaisersiepen in 1927, and that from 1928 the brewery concentrated on Pils, because the very soft water suited the style; the company dates the discovery to 1928 and places the spring on the edge of the Arnsberg Forest, near the brewery that stands there today. Pils has been Warsteiner’s core product ever since, sold under the Warsteiner Premium name; English Wikipedia calls the flagship Pilsener Premium Verum.

Growth followed in the second half of the century. By 1960 output had passed 100,000 hectolitres a year, enough to count among Germany’s large breweries, and the company says it then took its own stands at regional food fairs in Hamburg, Munich and Dortmund. As demand for Pils rose, the old brewery in the town centre ran out of room. Building began on a new site on the southern edge of Warstein in 1974, and in 1976 the family opened the Waldparkbrauerei, the “forest park brewery,” which the company billed as one of the largest and most modern in Europe. The company says output first passed one million hectolitres in 1978, and German Wikipedia says that by 1984, at more than two million hectolitres, Warsteiner was Germany’s biggest beer brand. The record year, according to the trade magazine Inside, was 1994, at more than six million hectolitres.

Warsteiner built its marketing around the brand rather than individual beers, German Wikipedia says. The range today includes the Premium Pilsener, a more bitter Herb, a non-alcoholic version, Radler and a Dunkel brewed for the American market. The company’s name is also on the Warsteiner Internationale Montgolfiade, a hot-air balloon festival it reported on in 2025, and since 1994 it has given the Warsteiner Preis, a German award for hospitality. In May 2006 it opened a visitor centre at the brewery, the Warsteiner Welt, whose entrance hall is fronted by a copper brewing kettle.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all German beer brands: Beck’s, Krombacher, Warsteiner, Bitburger, Paulaner, Erdinger and Radeberger. German 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 and drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a label, a name and the town it comes from, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place 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 bottled.

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 packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Nine generations and a group of regional brands.

Warsteiner is still a family business. Since 2006 it has been led by Catharina Cramer, the youngest daughter of Albert Cramer; the company says she was the first woman in the firm’s history to take a seat in its management, and that from 2012 she continued the business in the ninth generation. German Wikipedia names her as the sole owner. The parent company is the Haus Cramer Holding KG in Warstein, and the brewery itself is the Warsteiner Brauerei Haus Cramer KG.

Around the Warsteiner name the family has assembled a group of regional brands. In 1990 it took over the brewing business of the Nies group, with the Paderborner, Isenbeck and other brands and a brewery in Paderborn; it bought a stake in the König Ludwig Schlossbrauerei Kaltenberg in Bavaria in 2001, took on the Frankenheim brewery in 2005 and the Herforder brewery in 2007. Abroad, it owned the Argentine brewer C.A.S.A. Isenbeck until 2010, when the company says it sold the business to SABMiller under a long-term licence for the Argentine market. German Wikipedia says Warsteiner is exported to more than 60 countries, and English Wikipedia says that in some markets it is brewed under licence by Mahou-San Miguel.

Since 2023 a subsidiary has offered contract brewing; the Soester Anzeiger reported in May 2024 that Warsteiner had begun brewing Tyskie Gronie for Asahi’s German arm, and the trade publisher Meininger reported that Efes Pilsener would be brewed in Warstein for the Anadolu Efes group. On 7 May 2026, n-tv reported, Haus Cramer announced that its breweries in Herford and Paderborn would be closed or sold, with production of the Herforder and Paderborner brands moving to the home site in Warstein, a move the group said was a response to falling beer consumption.

For a design guide, Warsteiner shows how a family name, a town and a single beer style can carry a national brand: the Warstein name, the Cramer family and the Pils brewed beside the Arnsberg Forest. Compare Krombacher, another family-owned Pils brewery in North Rhine-Westphalia, and Bitburger, a family Pils house in the Eifel. For this guide we use forest green, Pils gold and brewhouse copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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