The Augustiner brewery expands. Because there is not enough space on the main site on Landsberger Strasse and the company wants to avoid further traffic pollution in the city center, an expansion of the Freiham location is planned. The aim of this is to “reflect the increased and changed production requirements due to market developments”, the brewery justifies the project. She does not give specific figures in her application to initiate a development plan procedure in Freiham-Süd. The expansion step is “absolutely necessary because the brewery has been working at the limit of its capacity in the bottling area for a long time,” declared the two managing directors and shareholders Werner Mayer and Martin Leibhard when asked. In addition, “the corona crisis and the associated restaurant closings with a simultaneous decline in draft beer sales due to higher bottled beer sales have exacerbated this capacity bottleneck”.
Augustiner-Bräu Wagner KG has been based in the Freiham-Süd industrial park since 2008, and the company maintains an external warehouse for barley, malt and bottled beer there. This logistics center is now to be expanded. The intention is to build a three-storey bottle filling center, which will be connected to the existing hall on the first floor via a transport bridge and which will be expanded in a second stage. This building will ultimately have a wall height of 23 meters. A second logistics center with an underground car park and a high-bay warehouse or, alternatively, a third logistics hall are planned to be directly adjacent to the Lindau autobahn.
For the time being, however, the future high-bay warehouse area will serve as a parking space for the company’s own trucks. The company also wants to deposit empties there. “Definitely and in the long term, not a single type of our beers will be brewed in Freiham, only some of them will be bottled there,” emphasize Mayer and Leibhard. The existing bottle filling systems at the Landsberger Strasse site remained “of course fully operational”.
The realization of the project in Freiham is possible thanks to an exchange of land with the city. Because on the brewery site on Landsberger Straße, the new construction of two additional bottling plants would not have been possible at all for reasons of space and monument protection, according to the municipal department. Apart from the fact that “no longer manageable, additional and internal traffic”, according to the company’s own statements, would have led to “severe restrictions on the delivery capability” of the Augustiner beer.
In Freiham, on the other hand, the spatial capacities are available, even if the zoning plan has to be changed and a project-related development plan must be drawn up.
“The planning”, it says in praise in the draft for an introductory and installation resolution, which the district committee Aubing-Lochhausen-Langwied approved on Wednesday evening, represents “a very space-saving variant” for the expansion of the brewery area Stacking two bottling plants could “minimize the area and at the same time avoid having to set up another location in the city in addition to the locations in the city center and in Freiham-Süd”. In addition, this reduces both inner-city delivery traffic and shuttle traffic to and from Freiham. And “the very efficient road network” in Freiham-Süd with a direct connection to the motorway could “probably handle the additional traffic well”. Expert opinions on this are still to be drawn up. From the point of view of the planning department, these synergy effects “justify”, especially from the point of view of the city as a whole, “the considerable space consumption and the new sealing”.
The administration appreciates that Augustiner wants to equip the flat roofs of the new buildings with a combination of photovoltaics and green roofs in order to reduce the negative effects of the development on the natural balance, also in the form of punctual mounds that should offer insects an opportunity to winter. Aubing’s local politicians, however, are calling for the use of natural gas to be avoided “if possible”. The brewery would like to use this fossil fuel to generate correspondingly high temperatures for the bottling lines, the process technology and the keg filling in addition to the district heating connection. The district representatives, on the other hand, would advocate a “climate and environmentally friendly energy supply”.