Region & History

Travel up the Rhine from Basel and after about twenty kilometers you reach Rheinfelden. Right by the train station stands a brewery castle complete with towers and battlements. Feldschlösschen was founded in 1876 by brewer Theophil Roniger and farmer's son Mathias Wüthrich, in a disused aniline dye factory in the Fricktal, canton of Aargau.

The brewery grew rapidly. In 1882 output was expanded from 15,000 to 30,000 hectoliters a year, and by 1887 it reached 45,000. A hectoliter is a hundred liters, roughly three hundred standard glasses of beer. The building was constructed in the castle style popular in industrial architecture at the time, which is how the brewery got its name, meaning "field castle."

Today Feldschlösschen belongs to the Danish Carlsberg Group and, by production volume, counts as Switzerland's largest brewery. The castle itself is a well-known day-trip destination along the railway line between Basel and Zurich.

Basel tells a different story. The city's first brewery is recorded as early as 1488. Around 1870 there were still roughly ten breweries operating there, after which most of them closed. Warteck, which started in 1856 as a small house brewery opposite what was then the Baden railway station, brewed the city's first Pilsner under Bernhard Füglistaller. In 1990 the brewery on Riehenring ceased operations, and the site is now a cultural quarter.

Small breweries still operate in Basel today, among them Fischerstube with its Ueli Bier and Unser Bier. The Swiss Brewers Association, founded in 1877, counted around 1,192 breweries nationwide in 2023. Unlike Kölsch, there's no protected designation of origin for Basel beer.