Swiss Review 2/2018

6 Swiss Review / March 2018 / No.2 MARC LETTAU The seat of Swiss national government is ideally posi- tioned as far as beer goes. Anyone who dines at the Galerie des Alpes restaurant in the Federal Palace will not only see the Alps but also have an unobstructed view of the brewery site at the foot of the Gurten mountain, home to the traditional Bernese “Gurten” beer. However, it is not served in the Federal Palace despite the view. ThirstyMPs and Federal Councillors have the choice between other lo- cal beers from Burgdorf and Einsiedeln. The brewery in Gurten has actually been consigned to the past. Today the site houses fantastic residential accommodation and in- novative companies. The brewery founded in 1864 quenched the thirst of the federal capital for over a cen- tury. The company then got caught up in an economic downturn. In 1970, it was taken over by the Feldschlöss- chen Group, the largest brewery in Switzerland. This com- pany currently brews a beer called “Gurten” at its com- pany headquarters in Rheinfelden, Aargau. This story typifies the general situation. It has been much worse elsewhere than in stately Berne. In Fribourg, the collapse of the Cardinal brewery, whichwas established in 1788, sparked a major crisis in the canton. When Cardi- nal closed down after struggling for years, Fribourg’s gov- ernment at the time was “shocked” and its president Beat Vonlanthen expressed “deep sadness” at the loss of some- thing that belonged to the canton and symbolised its own economic history. Cardinal only lives on as a name – on Rheinfelden bottles. “The last Eichhof” The concentration of the beer market alluded to in these two examples was unprecedented by Swiss standards. It es- sentially goes back to the collapse of the Swiss beer cartel and eventually also affected the big players. Feldschlöss- chen AG initially quenched its own thirst through many acquisitions of regional breweries. However, in 2000, Feld- schlösschen itself was taken over by Carlsberg, the Danish beer multinational. Heineken, the Dutch brewery group, was also shopping in Switzerland at the same time. The Grissons beer “Calanda Bräu”, for example, is Dutch strictly speaking. “Eichhof” beer from Lucerne is also part of the Heineken empire. The futility of taking a stand became ev- ident in Lucerne. Students from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich launched a computer game at the time called “The Last Eichhof”, the aimof whichwas to pre- vent a hostile takeover with lots of shooting. It was all in vain, but grumblings about the globalisation of the beer market became louder. Today, a generation on, the picture is completely differ- ent. Over 60% of the beer consumed in Switzerland comes from breweries controlled by Carlsberg (Feldschlösschen) and Heineken (Eichhof, Calanda). However, hundreds of small-scale setups and microbreweries have emerged to take on the global multinationals. While Switzerland had just 31 operational breweries in 1991, there are over 900 to- day. No other country in the world has such a dense con- centration of breweries in relation to its population. All the niche players are shaking up themarket with an estimated 5,000 different beers. From “Öufi” to “Sierrvoise” Local patriotic sentiment seems to have surfaced across the country. Solothurn today mainly drinks “Öufi” beer and extols the virtues of number 11 which is celebrated as the town’s special number (“öuf” means “eleven”). In contrast, Sierre swears by “La Sierrvoise”. Burgdorf espouses the lo- cal brewery’s slogan of “beer needs a home” and willingly backs this up through its drinking habits. The small town now has a second notable brewery in Blackwell. There seems to be plenty of room in the newhomes of beer. Local markets are turning into micro-local ones. Every district has its own beer. Adrian Sulc, a business editor and long-standing ob- server of the trend, believes the local patriotism has to be put in perspective: “Most people drink local beer because they like their local brewers and not due to their political outlook.” A general trend can be identified: “Because glo- Every district has its own beer The bottle cap comes off with a “pop”, the beer flows into the glass, bubbles rise and a frothy head forms. There is nowhere with such a wide range of beers as Switzerland. It now has the largest con- centration of breweries in the world. This can be seen partly as a response to the major crisis in the Swiss beer industry and the demise of many traditional brands. Focus