Wicküler
Wicküler
The story of Wicküler Brewery begins in 1845, when entrepreneur Franz Ferdinand Joseph Wicküler from Münstereifel founded a small home brewery in Wuppertal-Elberfeld and thereby laid the foundation for one of the most significant and traditional breweries in the Bergisches Land region. After the founder's death, his son Franz Joseph Wicküler took over management of the company in 1867, converting the brewery in 1887 into the «Wicküler-Brauerei Aktien-Gesellschaft» with a share capital of 1.5 million gold marks and in the same year brewing the first Pilsner – an innovation that laid the cornerstone for the best-known beer variety of the brand to this day. In 1896 the company merged with the neighbouring Küpper-Brauerei to form the Wicküler-Küpper-Brauerei AG, moving into the front rank of West German large breweries, with the brewery growing under the management of director Henry Reichert and the owning Werhahn family from Neuss through the acquisition of Wuppertal competitors Gesenberg, Feldschloss, Waldschloss, Adler and Bremme into the undisputed market leader in the Bergisches Land and one of the best-known beer brands in Germany.
Wicküler Brewery reached the height of its national fame in the 1960s and 1970s, when the legendary advertising slogan «Männer wie wir – Wicküler Bier» – «Men like us – Wicküler Beer» – with its three musketeer figures became one of the most recognisable and most quoted advertising slogans in German brewing history and made the brand known throughout Germany far beyond the borders of the Bergisches Land. In 1990 the Werhahn family sold the group to the Dutch Grolsch brewery, which shortly afterwards sold the company on to Brau und Brunnen from Dortmund – the beginning of a painful farewell for Wuppertal that came to its sad conclusion in 2004 with the final closure of the brewery site in Wuppertal, which today lives on in the converted brewery complex as the Wicküler City shopping centre.
Wicküler Pils has been produced since 1992 by the Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei on behalf of the Radeberger Gruppe – a classic, bottom-fermented German Pilsner at 4.9% ABV that with its characteristically clear, golden-yellow colour, its fresh hop aroma, its well-balanced, finely bitter flavour and its clean, refreshing finish preserves the unmistakable character of a genuine West German Pilsner, proving that a beer brand that has stood for quality and tradition for over 175 years lives on even when its home brewery has long since become history.