Books about alcoholic beverages tend to fall into two groups: serious scholarly works about the social and cultural contexts and meanings of alcohol, and popular glossy “coffee-table” books that offer a readable text and many illustrations, but little substance beyond provincial or corporate propaganda. This book falls somewhere in-between.

To judge the book by its cover, it is a glossy coffee-table book. Leafing through the book, nearly every page features at least one picture, and most of them are in full color. Starting at the beginning, the two Vorworte of the book were written by the brew master of Schwechat (the brand featured most prominently in the book) and the general director of the Brau Union Österreich AG (which owns several of the brand names featured in the book, including Schwechat). The introduction is lighthearted and fun, proclaiming the authors’ “Liebe zum Bier!” (exclamation point in original.) Rather than a clichéd mea culpa for any errors, the authors glibly announce that they have purposefully included errors and will make a contest of finding them: the authors pledge to invite whoever finds the most errors to a “bieriges Abendessen.”

However, this is also a serious work of scholarship—a kind of a microhistory of beer—based on extensive and impressive archival research and thoroughly footnoted. The metanarrative is laid out clearly in the second chapter. Vienna was a wine-producing (and drinking) area until craftsmen from Germany introduced beer in the late Middle Ages. The local feudal authorities granted a beer-brewing monopoly to a charitable religious institution (the Bürgerspital) in the fifteenth century. In the late seventeenth century, the Bürgerspital increasingly licensed the right to brew and sell beer in Vienna to other brewers, and in the eighteenth century, the deregulation and spread of beer production was part of a broader liberalization of the economy and decline of the guild system. The nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution brought radical advances in the technology and an increase in the scale of brewing in Vienna. The twentieth century's familiar economic and political disruptions also had their effects on the brewing industry.

The protagonist and message of the book is also clear. Anton Dreher, owner and brew master at Klein-Schwechat, is credited with inventing light (helles) bottom-fermented lager beer in 1841. This book is largely a commemoration of the 175th anniversary of Dreher's breakthrough, and presumably commemorating Austria's contribution to world beer culture is part of the Brau Union Österreich's “target of making Austria the nation with the best beer culture in Europe,” their claim to “play a pioneering role in the beer market,” and their “wish to make the Austrians proud of their beer culture” (www.brauunion.at/en/beer-culture).

Dreher had toured the beer-producing regions of Europe as a young man, and he was able to combine various cutting-edge techniques to produce a modern high-quality beer. Dreher embraced industrial mass production and transportation and finance capitalism and thereby rapidly expanded production and sales. By the late nineteenth century, Schwechat was the biggest brewer not only in Vienna but also in the world. Beyond producing huge quantities of good beer, the Drehers also built beer halls and beer gardens and thereby influenced (or even created) the “beer culture” in Vienna. Following the death of Dreher's son in 1921, the rest of the Dreher family quickly sold their stakes in Schwechat. The brewery went through several hands and then was part of the Mautner Markhof food-producing/processing conglomerate for decades, during which time it broke new ground in marketing by being the first beer brand to sponsor a soccer club. Ultimately, through another round of reorganizations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Schwechat became part of Brau Union Österreich, which is part of the global Heineken conglomerate.

There is little to complain about here, beyond the self-conscious and transparent promotion of Viennese beer. The organization of the book is awkward. The authors sought to produce a “beer geography” of Vienna, so rather than organizing the book chronologically, the book is organized by sector of Vienna (center, north, and east, and so on), and each chapter is a series of potted histories of individual breweries. Beyond an audience motivated by a love of beer, this book should appeal to anyone interested in the urban history (especially of Vienna), industrial history, family history, social history, and, of course, food history.