The family spirit and tradition behind the Baar Brewery

You head home from work, kiss your wife, take off your tie and your shoes and head for the fridge for what has been on your mind for the past two hours, for your reward after a gruelling day earning your living. When you open that bottle of beer and hear the “psssst” sound, the message reaches your brain cells that it’s the end of the day and time for a break.
 
Beer is not just a drink, it is so much more and on Thursday night thanks to Brauerei Baar, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, ZIBF and ZUG4YOU.ch we had a chance to find out the story behind the third most popular drink in the world (after water and tea).   
 
The owners of the Baarer Brewery, Kurt Uster and his son Martin, opened the doors of their family-run enterprise to show us where the brewing of malt and hops and the fermentation of the beer take place. Everything is done by modern technology nowadays, but supervisors are still required to keep an eye on the various processes and monitor the temperatures, quantities and carbon dioxide levels. What also stays out of reach for the modern machinery is the composition of substances that give each beer its characteristic flavour and reflect the personal touch of the master brewer. Currently there are 26 people working at the Baarer Brauerei, producing an amazing 1.3 million litres per year of which 70% is consumed in Zug and the surrounding area.
 
The Baar Brewery is one of the oldest in Switzerland. It first opened in 1862 but struggled in the early years, changing hands on a number of occasions but things began looking up in 1902, when it was bought by Johann Georg Buck, the great-grandfather of the current owner Kurt Uster. Buck passed the business on to his son Christian, who steered the brewery through the hardest years of the two World Wars (six other breweries were forced to close in the canton in 1914-15 alone).  An important part of the brewery's history is the building of the 26-metre high brew house in 1952 and the implementation of the brewing vat, which was later renovated and computerised by Kurt Uster and now looks more like a copper spaceship.
 
Christian Buck died after 60 years at the helm, and his three children – Dora, Christian and Walter – took over the business. 20 years on, rising costs and a stagnant market forced Christian junior to sell the brewery, but his sister Dora kept her promise to her father and stayed in the family business. She also called her son Kurt, who at that time was working in Malaysia and together they bought her brothers’ shares in 1983. It turned out that the same Buck blood was running in Kurt’s veins and step by step, he revived the spirit of his ancestors' enterprise, renovating the brew house and computerising the system for filling the bottles, the labelling machine and the packing process. He also invested in new osmosis equipment to decalcify the water and installed a modern filtering system.  
 
Meanwhile Kurt’s son Martin decided also to stay in the family business and after studying brewing technology in Munich and serving an apprenticeship in Interlaken, he came back to help with the marketing and the sales.
 
Currently the Baarer Brauerei produces mainly lager beer (Hopfermandli,  Buegel Spez and BMB) as well as maize beer and an aromatic amber beer. Just before Christmas a limited edition of holiday beer will be released with a slight caramel taste. 
 
Of the 300 or so breweries in Switzerland, 16 have come together (including the Baar Brewery) to form the SBV Association, and between them they produce 95% of the country's beer, with annual consumption estimated at 450 thousand million litres – some 57 litres per person per year! My share is drunk by the way by my husband! Cheers!
 
Tsitaliya Mircheva-Petrova


See th pictures of the event here