New brewhouse for Tucher

When Germany’s Brau + Brunnen Group bought the Tucher brewery five years ago, they did not worry that they only bought the brands but not the real estate. They knew that someone else would have to fork out the money for a new brewery and making the whole investment pay off. Now who would that be? Well, Brau + Brunnen’s buyer, the Radeberger Group.

On 24 September 2008 the new Tucher brewhouse was opened. Radeberger says they spent 12 months and EUR 55 million on building it. It is a state-of-the-art plant, residing, incidentally, on the border between Nuremberg and Fürth which allows Radeberger to claim that it is the only two-city brewhouse in the world.

Germany’s beer consumption is declining. So it was a courageous act by the privately owned Radeberger Group (it is owned by Germany’s food company Dr Oetker) to invest serious money in a new plant. But what else could they do?

Perhaps they could have had the Tucher brands brewed at one of their 14 breweries in Germany. Yet, consumers of regional brands make their brand loyalty still depend on the material evidence of a brewery. In the case of Beck’s, which InBev has brewed at several locations in Germany, consumers probably could not care less where it has been mashed in. This is not the case when it comes to regional brands.

As with many Germany breweries, Tucher had been sitting on a prime piece of real estate in the centre of Fürth. Obviously, the owners, the Inselkamer family, had other plans for developing the brewery site.

Brau + Brunnen was not fazed by this as Tucher had already built a packaging plant on a nearby greenfield site and the Inselkammers were willing to allow the new owners to continue brewing on the site for a few years more. What is more, Brau + Brunnen could not have cared less if and where Tucher’s 1.7 million hl of beverages were produced as the troubled Brau + Brunnen group was already in the process of being sold to Germany’s major brewing group, Radeberger, and both Brau + Brunnen and Tucher obviously wanted to benefit from that.

There was not much that Radeberger could do about this scheme – only build a new brewhouse.

Putting on a brave face: (from left to right) Fred Höfler, Tucher Brauerei, Dr. Thomas Jung, Mayor of Fürth, Rosely Schweizer, Director of Dr. August Oetker, Dr. Ulrich Maly, Mayor of Nuremberg, Dagmar Wöhrl, MP, Ulrich Kallmeyer, CEO of Radeberger Group, Wieland Hoppen, Tucher Brauerei.