St. Pauli brewery

The former St. Pauli brewery on Bleicherstraße in Bremen

Advertisement for the Cabinet beer brand from 1910 (featuring Halley's comet )

The St. Pauli Brewery was a brewery in Bremen built by Lüder Rutenberg in 1857 , which was taken over by the Kaiserbrauerei Beck & Co. - today Beck & Co. - in 1918 .

history

The history of the St. Pauli brewery goes back to the 17th century. In 1853, Lüder Rutenberg, who became prosperous as an architect and building contractor in Bremen, acquired the Runge brewery in Bleicherstraße in Bremen's Ostertor together with his sister and her husband Heinrich A. Rust . In 1857 he expanded the business and named it St. Pauli Brewery after the St. Paul Monastery that was formerly located here .

The company, which became the third largest brewery in Bremen in 1860, developed into the largest brewery in the city in the following ten years. In 1862 Rutenberg accepted Carl Ludwig Wilhelm Brandt as a partner in the company in place of Heinrich Rust, and in 1864 Heinrich Beck became the brewmaster of the company. Soon after, Rutenberg sold his shares in the brewery to Brandt and invested in building what would later become the imperial brewery .

The St. Pauli brewery was continuously expanded: a second steam boiler was installed in 1871, an ice house in 1872 and a new brewhouse and a new cold store in 1879 . Only pale lager was produced for export - in particular the St. Pauli Girl brand, which was awarded twelve international medals, was very successful.

In 1882 a second production facility was built in Bremer Neustadt in order to meet the increasing demand. In 1887 Brandt sold the company to an English stock corporation, the St. Pauli Breweries Company Limited , further shares went to the Disconto-Gesellschaft from Berlin - Bremen remained a brewing facility, but all sales subsequently ran via London . In the time before the First World War, the St. Pauli Girl beer became the most famous German export beer worldwide. In 1890 the brewery had 260 employees who produced 82,000 hectoliters of beer a year. In Bremen, the company leased the “parking garage” built for the Northwest German Trade and Industry Exhibition in Bremen's Bürgerpark in the same year and ran a restaurant here.

When the British holdings in the company expired at the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the Berliner Diskonto-Gesellschaft became the company's main shareholder, but sold its shares in 1918 to the Kaiserbrauerei Beck & Co. (later Beck & Co. ) - the main competitor of St Pauli brewery in the export business. In 1921 Beck & Co. had to acquire the formerly English shares a second time as compensation for the holdings that had expired during the war. The brewery's well-known brands at the time - Tivoli , Minerva , Antilope , Fürst Bismarck , Pelican Bier and Cabinet - were produced until the 1930s, today only St. Pauli Girl is used , but its production is from Bleicherstraße to the brewery on Neustadtsdeich was relocated.

The remains of the brewery were supposed to be demolished in the 1970s for the construction of the Mozarttrasse , but when these plans could not be implemented, the buildings became part of the Bremen Theater , which operates the stages of the brewery cellar and the MoKS children's and youth theater in the old brewery .

literature

Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
Katerina Vatsella (Ed.): Bremer Handelsgüter: Beer. Hauschild, Bremen 1998, ISBN 3-931-785-80-7 .