Region & History

Order a beer in Slovenia and in most cases you'll get a Laško or a Union. Both names now belong to a single company, Pivovarna Laško Union, though their stories begin in two different places.

The brewery in Laško, a spa town on the Savinja, was founded in 1825 by Franz Geyer, a gingerbread baker and mead-maker. Union was founded in 1864 in Ljubljana and was for a long time its great rival. Union joined the Heineken Group in 2015, and in 2016 the two operations formally merged into Pivovarna Laško Union, now part of the Heineken Group.

The beer from Laško has its counterpart out in the fields. In the lower Sanntal around Žalec, hops grow, and large-scale cultivation there has roughly 140 years of tradition behind it. According to Slovenian lore, individual hop gardens go back even further, to the monastery gardens of the Middle Ages.

Since 2017, Štajerski hmelj, Styrian hops, has been registered in the EU as a protected geographical indication (PGI). The cones must grow within the designated area of Slovenia for the product to carry the name. The name recalls the old Lower Styria, to which the Sanntal once belonged.

Alongside the big group, a number of smaller breweries also operate in the country, and their numbers are slowly growing. In Žalec, the Ekomuzej hmeljarstva in pivovarstva, housed in a former hop kiln, displays old drying chambers and machinery. It was renamed in 2009 and keeps the history of hops alive in the town, where the harvest still takes place today.