Swiss beer — the cartel, the collapse and the thousand breweries

Swiss beer has an unusual recent history, and it explains why the shelves look the way they do.

The cartel

From 1935 to 1991 the Swiss brewers operated a legal cartel: prices were fixed, territories were allotted, brewers agreed not to compete in each other’s regions, and the recipes converged on a single inoffensive lager.

It worked, in the sense that it kept everyone in business. It also meant that for two generations there was effectively one Swiss beer with different labels on it, and the number of breweries fell from several hundred to about thirty.

When the cartel ended in 1991, the big names were bought by Heineken and Carlsberg within a few years — and then something unexpected happened.

The recovery

Small breweries started opening, and kept opening. Switzerland now has over a thousand registered breweries for eight and a half million people, which is more per head than Germany, Belgium or the Czech Republic.

Most are tiny and sell locally, which is exactly why you have not heard of them and why the interesting beer is in a shop rather than an export catalogue.

What to try

Appenzeller Quöllfrisch — from the independent Locher brewery in Appenzell, and the one Swiss beer that travels. The same brewery makes a beer conditioned in a cave, and one brewed with hemp.

Feldschlösschen — the big national lager, brewed in a genuinely extraordinary neo-Gothic castle brewery near Basel that can be visited. Danish-owned now.

Calanda — from Chur, and the standard beer of Graubünden.

Rugenbräu — from Interlaken, which also matures a beer in a tunnel at the Jungfraujoch.

Öufi — from Solothurn, brewed at eleven minutes past eleven, because that town has a thing about the number.

Anything local. In practice the best approach is to drink whatever the region brews — nearly every canton has at least one independent brewery, and the small ones are usually the good ones.

What to order

Stange — the standard glass, 3 dl, of lager. Grosses — 5 dl. Panaché — beer and lemonade, half and half, and entirely respectable here.

Most Swiss beer is lager: Lagerbier hell as standard, Spezli stronger, and dark and wheat versions widely available. The craft breweries make everything else.

Drinking it

Beer is cheaper than wine in a restaurant and much cheaper in a supermarket, where a bottle costs a fraction of the bar price — the difference is larger here than almost anywhere.

Note that supermarkets stop selling alcohol at certain hours in some cantons, and shops shut entirely on Sundays outside the stations; see shopping.

And the rest

Rivella — made from milk whey, and the national soft drink. It tastes better than that description and there is no equivalent anywhere else.

Kirsch and Williams — cherry and pear spirits, from central Switzerland and the Valais, and the thing to have after a fondue.

Absinthe — invented in the Val-de-Travers above Neuchâtel, banned in 1910, distilled illegally for most of a century and legal again since 2005.