The Stein brewery was founded in 1872. The brewery site was located and gradually built up from 1873 on the Blumental outskirts, close to the horse railway station, which in the year of the brewery's foundation had just been converted to a steam-powered railway. Beer was transported by rail not only to the regions of Slovakia and towards Moravia and the Czech Republic, but also to the Danube harbour and onwards along the river to Europe. At the beginning of the 1920s, the brewery was named Brüder Stein Brauerei A.G.. Later, from the 1930s until nationalisation in 1948, it was called Bratislavský pivovar a sladovňa, Bratia Steinovia (Bratislava Brewery and Malthouse, Stein Brothers). After the establishment of the Slovak state, the Stein family sold the majority share in the brewery to the Slovak Bank.
The first construction stage of the brewery took place between 1876 and 1896, when a brewhouse and fermentation plant were built along Legionárska Street. The oldest building on the premises was the bottling and draff drying room. The boiler house was oriented to the courtyard, as well as the cask washing room, where the casks were also treated with pitch. There was also a beer taproom with a large lager cellar. On Blumentálska Street, an administration building was built, which also contained the employees' flats. In the interwar period, a cold store with a water tower was built. While the oldest buildings were both structurally and formally traditional buildings typical for the production of the Bratislava building family Feigler, the cooling house with a water tower was a modern reinforced concrete technical building of the Pittel+Brausewetter company. This firm was also involved in the expansion of the site during World War II. In that period, a silo and a boiling house were built. In 1944, the construction of a new fermentation plant (Spilka) was permitted, which was carried out after the nationalisation of the company and its renaming to Západoslovenské pivovary, n.p. (Western Slovakia Breweries, state-owned enterprise). The structurally demanding monumental construction with a shell dome (designed by the architect Herbert Zrnovský) stretched until the mid-1950s. The last reconstruction of the premises took place in 1967–1973, and was thus completed in the year of the centenary of the founding of the brewery.
Together with Stollwerck (later the Figaro Chocolate Factory), the Stein Brewery was the largest and most important food industry company in the city in the 20th century. Production at the brewery stopped in 2008. Despite the fact that in 2013 the Monuments Board of the Slovak Republic proposed a set of brewery buildings to be declared national heritage, the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic decided only to declare Spilka (fermentation plant). The rest of the complex was demolished in 2014 and replaced by the Stein apartment complex. At the same time, Spilka was converted into administrative premises.
Bibliography:
KIRINOVIČOVÁ, Naďa: Pivovar Stein. In BARTOŠOVÁ, Nina – HABERLANDOVÁ, Katarína (ed.): Stein a Ludwigov mlyn. Industriál očami odborníkov/pamätníkov. Bratislava, STU 2015, s. 13 – 19.
