Ottakringer Brauerei

Ottakringer has been brewing on the same ground since 1837, and the ground is now the middle of a residential district. Heinrich Plank, a master miller from Rannersdorf, bought a Klosterneuburg monastery property on 18 September that year and put a brewery, a dance hall and a beer garden on eight thousand square metres of it. Ottakring was still a village outside Vienna then — it only became the 16th district in 1892. The brewery stayed where it was. Walk up Ottakringer Straße today and the kiln tower, finished in 1908, stands over the tenement roofs: the plainest sign in the city that the beer here is made rather than delivered.

What the tour actually shows you

This is a working plant, not a museum of one. The tour takes an hour and a half, covers the history and then the brewing process itself, and finishes where it should — a tasting of the beers straight from the tap. Fifteen or so come out of this site, among them Ottakringer Helles, Gold Fassl, the chestnut-brown Wiener G’mischtes, and the Wiener Original, brewed to a recipe more than a hundred years old. Around 420,000 hectolitres leave the brewery each year, drawn on its own well beneath the site, begun in 1891 and seven years in the digging.

Book the right day

English tours do not run daily, and this is the thing to sort out before anything else. They go on Tuesdays and Thursdays at four in the afternoon, Fridays at six and Saturdays at five — one tour per day, and a separate booking from the German-language tours, which run on most days of the week. Everyone meets at the Brewery Shop on Ottakringer Straße, a few minutes downhill from the U3 terminus. You have to be 16 or over. Groups can arrange a tour of their own by request.

The rest of the site

The old brewing halls have a second life. Hopfenboden, Hefeboden, Gerstenboden, the Alte Technik and the Gold Fassl Magazin now take concerts, markets and parties — some five thousand events and a quarter of a million guests a year, which is why the courtyard is often full of people with no interest in the tour at all. Brauwerk, the brewery’s own small craft operation, works out of the same grounds.