Beer brewery (Part 1), Satakunta, Finland

Visited 31.1.2015 by skkye & jonahi. This used to be the longest functioning beer brewery in Finland that stayed on the same site all the way. The factory started to serve the thirsty by brewing its first bottles of beer in 1853. It functioned more than a hundred years without big drama, but in 1972 the company was sold to Sinebrychoff. Sinebrychoff, on its part, was sold to Danish Carlsberg in 1997.

This beer factory was producing several beers and sodas, including Pepsi. It was also the first one in Finland to start packaging the beers also in cans. In the end one single beer brand made about 80 percent of the brewery's production, and after the brewing of that beer was moved to another town (which already was a catastrophe), the factory was decided to run down. These pictures reveal some anger and disappointment of the factory's workers in a form of a toy truck that says "an aid package to Kerava" with band aids forming words "OFF". Actually the whole town was mad about the decision, not only because the city had invested a lot to keep this factory alive. But boycotting the company's products and protesting didn't help the cause, and the brewery produced its last bottle of beverage in September 2009. This is not the first nor the last time in history when it proves unprofitable to sell local companies to huge multinational corporations. It only makes the owner rich and everyone else poor, at least because they end up losing jobs and pieces of their cultural history. However, there is nowadays a microbrewery and its restaurant functioning on the same plot.

The production lines, tanks and other machinery has been mostly sold away, and there are plans to build apartment houses on the property, even though the building inventory that has been conducted assessed most of the buildings as valuable and suggested to preserve them. I will be curious to see what happens to the factory in the future.

It was by the way very exciting to get in here - the place is very centrally located and there were a lot of people going past the place continuously. The layer of snow didn't help us, and we ended up leaving too many revealing footprints. We had to borrow a huge ladder in order to climb past a high fence with very nasty spikes on top of it. I was very scared to pierce my eyeball there, or worse, but we survived and found a way in the building as well! Of course we returned the ladder afterwards. It's funny how we always end up finding ladders to borrow when we really need one to get in!

More posts from here coming soon!