Traveling to Vienna

Grüß Gott BA’s!

I have a research trip to Vienna coming up this June and wanted to find things to do in my free time when I’m not in the archives. I was looking for pubs and smaller breweries in the city, and especially good hang out spots for meeting locals. I will be staying in the Währing district. I know of Ottakringer and that Vienna is generally more of a wine city than it is for beer, but I certainly want to find some good spots for a drink and if there are any good places for Austria’s rather small craft industry.

 

From my assessment, I would say that while the craft beer "explosion" in Vienna includes pale ales and IPAs, many brewers also make Vienna Lagers, Helles, and Pilsners. I would say that lagers tend to be more prominent and therefore get more of a market share than they do in many parts of the US, and the quality of these lagers is also fairly high as well comparatively speaking.

I suspect a lot of it has to do with the way brewers over there are trained (mostly in lager brewing), as well as what Austrian consumers tend to expect, which is lager under the roof of Austrian Märzen, Vienna Lager, Helles, and Pilsner. Conversely, their ales tend to be not as great as in the United States - there is, I think, still some inexperience in this regarding. There are some issues with off-flavors at certain breweries, or not using hops to their maximum effect.

The one major stumbling block for Austrian craft beer is the preset preferences of Otto Normalverbraucher (the daily consumer personified) - most beer drinkers prefer their drink light, cheap, and sold in quantity. Then that is overlayed with regionally-based preferences (The Viennese like Ottakringer, Salzburgers prefer Stiegl, and so on), although that is changing with younger generations who just pick and choose what they want (and what is cheapest). Craft beer is expensive and few breweries have a historical tie with the region in which they are brewing their beer. Also, the industrial breweries are just simply high quality and deeply experienced anyway.

 

If you want craft in the touristy district (The 1st District or “Inner-City”), try the 1516. It’s a guys’ pub though, I don’t think your wife and daughter would be comfortable with how the waitresses are dressed over there!

 

I’m curious about what you mean by this distinction. Like traditional styles, but using modern hops, or traditional styles brewed the traditional way, but by younger and smaller-scale breweries?

Güsswerk from Salzburg brews a lot of traditional and “modern” styles, specifically though they have a Granitbier (a type of ale with a unique medieval Austrian brewing process that consists of suspending hot granite stones into the brewing vat to increase the temperature), as well as a Vienna Lager. I don’t find Gusswerk to be the best though.

There’s also Hofstetten from Upper-Austria that has a similar thing with granite beer and what they purport to be the original recipe for the beer served at the first Oktoberfest in 1810.

Many Upper-Austrians speak highly of Freistädter Bier, from the small town of Freistadt, but it’s hard to find (likely only at bottle shops or the region around Freistadt).

Trumer is a popular quasi-craft offering, brewing a delicious Pilsner as well as also Märzen, Zwickl, and Radler. Relatively easy to find in shops, and it is also well-advertised at the restaurants that serve it (Gmoa Keller is one of them, but really a lot of hipster restaurants and bars also sell it too).

Touristy as hell, but Salm-Bräu has decent traditional choices brewed at their Garten near the Belvedere Palace.