Carlsberg gave the world lager yeast and the idea of pH
A Danish brewery lab gave chemistry the pH scale. Brewer J. C. Jacobsen founded the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1875 to tackle brewing problems, and there Emil Christian Hansen isolated the yeast behind pale lager, which the company then shared freely. A foundation has controlled Carlsberg since 1887.
Jacobsen, a science-loving philanthropist, finished his first brew on 10 November 1847 and named the beer after his son Carl. Exports began modestly in 1868 with a single barrel shipped to Edinburgh. Early logos included an elephant, still remembered in some lager names, and a swastika, dropped in the 1930s once the Nazi party had made it toxic.
Father and son then fell out. Carl opened his own Ny, or New, Carlsberg brewery in 1882, obliging Jacobsen to rename his Gamle, or Old, Carlsberg. The quarrel shaped the company for good: when Jacobsen died in 1887 he left his brewery to the Carlsberg Foundation, which he had set up in 1876 under trustees from the Royal Danish Academy to fund Danish research across the sciences and humanities. The two breweries merged in 1906 under Carl, a keen art collector whose works have been on public view in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek since 1897.
Brewing abroad started in Cyprus in 1966, with the first overseas plant built at Blantyre in Malawi two years later. A 1970 merger with Tuborg was followed by a tie-up with Tetley in 1992, and in 2008 Carlsberg and Heineken jointly bought Scottish & Newcastle, Britain's largest brewer, for £7.8 billion. Its portfolio now spans Kronenbourg, Holsten, Feldschlösschen and Super Bock.
Carlsberg ranks as the world's seventh biggest brewer by revenue and employs about 33,000 people. It has lately looked beyond beer: a £3.3 billion takeover of Britvic, maker of Robinsons squash and Tango, was approved in 2024 and folded into Carlsberg Britvic. The old Copenhagen brewery reopened as a museum, Home of Carlsberg, in December 2023.
Source: Carlsberg Group
