Qualla: Warsteiner

Warsteiner: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petra Klawikowski, CC BY-SA 3.0. The receipt has survived. In 1753, a Westphalian farmer in the small town of Warstein paid one thaler and nineteen guilders in tax on beer that he had brewed and sold himself. That single tax record is the oldest documented mention of what would become, two hundred and seventy-three years later, Germany's largest family-owned brewery. Antonius Cramer was not building a beer dynasty when he handed over those coins. He was settling his bill. But nine generations of Cramers later, the company is still in family hands, still brewing inside the Arnsberg Forest Nature Park, and still ranked fifth among Germany's best-selling breweries.

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Image: Petra Klawikowski | CC BY-SA 3.0

Warsteiner: From a Farmer's House

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petra Klawikowski, CC BY-SA 3.0. Brewing in Westphalia in the 1750s was not yet an industry. Most farmhouses with a hop garden made beer for their own table and sold the surplus to neighbors when there was any. Antonius Cramer's home brewery would have been one of dozens in the Sauerland hill country. What separ...

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Image: Petra Klawikowski | CC BY-SA 3.0

Warsteiner: The Reinheitsgebot

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petra Klawikowski, CC BY-SA 3.0. Warsteiner brews under the Reinheitsgebot, the German purity law, which is older than the brewery itself by two and a half centuries. The original Bavarian edict of 1516 limited beer ingredients to water, barley, and hops; yeast was later added once people understood what it did....

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Image: Petra Klawikowski | CC BY-SA 3.0

Warsteiner: Premium Verum

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ccyyrree, CC0. The brewery's flagship is Warsteiner Premium Verum, a pilsener with 4.8 percent alcohol by volume. It is exported to more than sixty countries and is, by quite a wide margin, the bottle the brewery is known for outside Germany. The mark of a German pilsener of this style is restr...

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Image: Ccyyrree | CC0

Warsteiner: Family Ownership in a Multinational Beer World

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petra Klawikowski, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most of the world's large breweries have, over the last forty years, been swallowed by a few global drinks companies. Warsteiner has not. Nine generations after Antonius Cramer paid his thaler and his nineteen guilders, the brewery remains in the hands of the Cramer family, a rar...

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Image: Petra Klawikowski | CC BY-SA 3.0

Warsteiner: A Brewery in a Forest

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wildfeuer, CC BY 2.5. The brewery sits not in town but just outside it, on the edge of the Arnsberg Forest Nature Park, where deep groundwater and easy access to fields and woods provide the raw materials it has always needed. The Warsteiner hot-air balloons, manufactured by the Spanish balloon-builde...

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Image: Wildfeuer | CC BY 2.5