Stiegl

Stiegl is Austria's largest privately owned brewery and Salzburg's house beer, with a paper trail running back to 16 June 1492, when the brewhouse "an der Gstätten" first appears in the city's records. The name came later, borrowed from the small staircase — Stiegl, in the local diminutive — that stood beside the old brewhouse, and it has outlasted five centuries of moves, expansions and changing fashions in Austrian beer.

For its first four centuries Stiegl brewed in Salzburg's old town, moving to the Maxglan district at the end of the nineteenth century as it outgrew the site. On 10 December 1912 the brewery registered the name Goldbräu, a nod to the gold medals its lager had been collecting — the same year Stiegl became Salzburg's biggest brewery.

The Kiener family has owned Stiegl for more than a century and kept it determinedly independent while much of Austrian brewing consolidated into international groups — a point of pride the brewery leans into. Goldbräu remains the flagship and the beer most Salzburgers mean when they simply order "a Stiegl," while the Maxglan brewery now doubles as a visitor destination, the Stiegl-Brauwelt, with its own brewing museum and taprooms.

Goldbräu is a smooth golden lager in the Austrian Märzen tradition: soft bready malt with a hint of honey, gentle noble-hop spice, and a clean, quenching finish.