Flensburger Brauerei is a brewery located in
Flensburg in the Bundesland (federal state) of
Schleswig-Holstein,
Germany. It is one of the last country-wide operating breweries not being part of a larger brewery group. The company was founded on September 6, 1888, by five citizens of Flensburg. Today it is still mainly held by the founder families Petersen and Dethleffsen.
Production
Before modern refrigeration, the brewery used to chop blocks of ice from frozen lakes in the winter and bring the blocks back to the brewery to keep their underground storage facilities cool in summer. The brewery still operates its own water well, which is supplied from an underground vein of very old
Ice Age melt water coming from
Scandinavia.
The company has about 120 employees (as of 2008) and is known for running technically advanced and highly automated production processes.
Products
All Flensburger products are bottled in glass bottles with a traditional
flip-top (swing-top) closure. This demands several complicated mechanisms for large-scale production, bottle cleaning and recycling processes.
The range of beers and other products includes the following.[1]
Beers
Flensburger Pilsener – North German variation of the
pilsener style with 4.8% abv
Flensburger Gold – Another
Pilsener (similar to
lager style) with 4.8% abv
Local people usual call Flensburger beers a “Flens” when ordering one. The
flip-top stopper makes a "plopp" sound when opening, which has become part of the
corporate identity.
Since running a marketing campaign emphasizing the stereotype of the stoic, blunt and ironic North German mentality the Flens brand has become a symbol of self-identification for the region.
Being sited next to the
campus the annual visit of the brewery has become a traditional event for the
process engineering students of Flensburg.
Once being a regional beer with its distribution centered mainly in Schleswig-Holstein, Flensburger became popular all over Germany with the "
Werner"-comics by
Rötger Feldmann (aka Brösel or Werner Brösel) in the 1980s.
Former US Secretary of State
Colin Powell became a fan of Flensburger Pilsener after his German colleague
Joschka Fischer gave him a crate of Flens as a gift during one of Powell's official visits to Germany. Fischer would continue to occasionally send Powell crates to the US throughout his tenure in office.
References
^"Produkte" (in German). Flensburger Brauerei. Archived from
the original on 12 April 2013. Retrieved 1 March 2013.