Region & History

How did German beer come to southern Chile? With a refugee. Karl Anwandter had taken part in the 1848 revolution in Germany and left the country afterward. In 1850 he reached Valdivia, a city in rain-soaked southern Chile that Pedro de Valdivia had founded in 1552, sitting at the confluence of three rivers.

In 1851 Anwandter began brewing on Isla Teja. At first, 18 bottles a month were enough for the family. Within a few decades this grew into an operation equipped with machinery from Germany: in 1858 the sons took over, and in 1873 the joint-stock company Anwandter Hermanos was formed.

The numbers climbed steeply. The family history records 700,000 liters a year in 1871, eight million in 1894, and already 25 million by 1914. Around 1883, the brewery is said to have supplied half the Chilean market.

Then came the blows. In 1912 a major fire destroyed large parts of the facility, and in 1916 the brewery passed to Cervecerías Unidas, today's CCU. On 22 May 1960, the Valdivia earthquake, the strongest ever recorded at magnitude 9.5, destroyed the factory completely.

After that, things stayed quiet for a long time. It was only in September 1991 that Armin Kunstmann, by his own account, started brewing again in a garage. In 1997 the brewery moved to the Torobayo district, and since 2002 half of the Kunstmann company has belonged to CCU.

There is no EU protected designation of origin for beer from Valdivia. So anyone drinking here isn't tasting a protected region, but a story interrupted by catastrophe and carried on by a garage project.