![The Beer Heritage of Odesa](/images/stories/pivo-odesskoe_label.jpg "A vintage label for "Odesskoe Osoboe" (Odessa Special) beer, produced in the former Ukrainian SSR")
Think of Odesa as a city of layered tastes: Greeks brought wine centuries ago, but beer — that frothy, convivial drink — is a relatively late, very urban arrival.
The first breweries in the region opened in the early 1820s, and by the turn of the century those small operations had become industrial concerns that shipped beer far beyond Odesa, won awards for quality, and—true to the spirit of a bustling port city—invented some of the most imaginative advertising to sell their product.
This is the story of how beer found a home on the Black Sea steppe: the entrepreneurs who brewed it, the streets and wells that fed the kettles, the adverts that sold a lifestyle, and the social scene—bierhalls—where Odesans raised their glasses.
Early Beer: How It Was
Brewing in Odesa begins quietly in the first decades of the 19th century. By 1824, records list four private breweries in the city — modest operations compared with the great European concerns, but enough to plant the idea of local beer in a place that had, until then, mainly celebrated wine.
Documentary evidence from that era is sparse, but one noteworthy entry appears in 1843: a merchant named Abaza—familiar to anyone who knows the corner of Hretska and Italiiska (formerly Pushkinska, today the site of the Museum of Western and Eastern Art)—was granted the right to make beer.
That single fact tells you two things: beer was becoming a regulated commodity, and the people running it were the same merchants who shaped Odesa's urban life.
Beer keg production during Tsarist times
For a long stretch — from the 1850s into the 1860s — it seems Odesa often had only one functioning brewery (according to contemporary sources). But the mid-1860s brought a change: Austrians, Germans and Swiss, taking advantage of Ukraine's plentiful wheat harvests, began investing in local brewing, raising techniques and scale. Over the following decades, Odesa would host two, three, sometimes four breweries at once, and brewing started to look less like cottage industry and more like industrial enterprise.
Imports mattered too. England, unsurprisingly, dominated the imported-beer market: in 1858, according to Apollon Skalkovsky's Notes on the Trade and Industrial Forces of Odesa (1865), a staggering 102,608 bottles of "porter and beer" arrived at the port from England. Turkey supplied 3,984 bottles, France only 612—tiny numbers in comparison—and barrels (1,088 poods) of beer also came from Galați. Those imports shaped local taste and supply, and they kept Odesa's taverns and merchants stocked while local brewing matured.
Beer: From Artisanal Production to the Anselm and Sanzenbacher Factories
Brewers go where there's water. In Odesa, that meant Vodyana Balka—wells and groundwater that made full-scale production possible. One of the most consequential names to enter the scene was Johann Anselm, who set up a brewery on Dalnytska Street in 1862. Over the next decades the area around Buhaiivka (sometimes written Bugayevka) turned into a beer neighborhood: Ashner, Vasyliev, Rote and Savytsky established breweries there, and even gave their names to parks and streets.
Anselm's operation grew fast. In 1872 the brewery produced about 160,000 buckets of beer; three years later that number had climbed to 600,000 buckets. The Anselm family also owned an estate in the village of Shabo, complete with a mansion that looks like a miniature castle—the residence of the well-known winemaker André Anselm in Europe. In Soviet times the estate became a tuberculosis dispensary, and after the Soviet collapse it fell into disrepair—today it stands as a derelict with hopes of eventual restoration.
An advertisement for the Kempe Brewery and the Durjan brothers
By the mid-1870s, 60% of Odesa's beer production was concentrated in the businesses of Anselm, Aschner and the partners Durjan and Kempe. Ownership changed hands in that entrepreneurial swirl: less than twenty years after Anselm's rise, Swiss entrepreneur Friedrich Jenny bought Anselm's brewery. Jenny not only kept production going—he exported beer abroad, taking an Odesa label onto wider markets and advertising the city's brewing prowess.
Yenny beer newspaper advertisement, promising to deliver beer to homes and the train station
Directories from the 1890s list Friedrich (Friedrichovich) Enni (Jenny) as a producer from 1883, with Pericles Rodokanaki recorded as his partner. These were not anonymous factories: they were merchants and families whose names were visible on ads and labels, and whose marketing attempted to sell not just a drink but a way of life—urban, stylish, continental.
Yenny beer advertising poster featuring a cossack
At the end of the 19th century another major figure arrived: Wilhelm Sanzenbacher, who founded an up-to-date brewery in 1890. The plant was modern for its time, well equipped, but it is no more. In the past decade, its location has been demolished to make way for a high-rise apartment complex, (currently in limbo due to a lack of building permits). By 1894 Sanzenbacher's business associated with Friedrich Gavrilovich Jenny, and in the early decades of the 20th century Sanzenbacher and Jenny together formed a dominant alliance in Odesa beer production.
Poster ad for the former Sanzenbacher brewery, from the early 1900s
By the first decade of the 1900s, the Sanzenbacher–Jenny concerns were among the largest producers in the region. Production and sales figures from 1913 illustrate their scale: Kempe and Duryan produced beer valued at 225,000 rubles, Jenny's concern produced beer worth 600,000 rubles, and Sanzenbacher produced beer worth 510,000 rubles. Smaller operations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—such as the Austrian Sodoma brewery, the South Russian Partnership, and the joint-stock Odesa Bavaria company—contributed to a lively, competitive market.
Postcard of the Yenny Brewery on Buhaiivka
War, Prohibition, and the Limits of Growth
Growth did not continue unchecked. World War I changed everything. Many breweries were owned or managed by Austro-Hungarian or German subjects; in the wartime climate, that could easily subject them to suspicion or closure. In the summer of 1914 the Russian Empire enacted what amounted to a form of Prohibition: alcohol sales were sharply restricted. There were even discussions about legally lowering beer's alcohol content to 3%—a dramatic intervention—but such measures were never fully implemented.
The government's restrictions had real consequences. Closing breweries put many people out of work—an economic cost the authorities downplayed—and pushed some production underground. Although 1914 saw reductions in hooliganism, alcohol-related suicides and crime in some statistics, illicit distillation and the sale of homemade substitutes skyrocketed. People drank beer and cognac disguised as tea; vodka was sometimes served as "mineral water" in cheap hotels and lodging houses. Tragically, the number of poisonings from alcohol substitutes rose during this period.
An illustration by A. A. Chikin, titled "Interior of a state wine shop". It depicts a scene inside a government-run alcohol store typical of the Russian Empire's state alcohol monopoly system
During the Civil War that followed the Revolution, the Soviet authorities imposed strict controls on production and sale of alcohol. Illegal production could mean harsh penalties—up to five years in prison for illicit distillers. Yet policy shifted with the New Economic Policy (NEP), and during the NEP years alcohol production, including beer, rebounded and in some cases exceeded pre-revolutionary levels.
By 1926–1927, records show that in the Odesa District there were only two working breweries: the "former Odesa Bavaria" brewery on Dalnytska Street and the Second State Brewery (on the site of the former Sanzenbacher enterprise). The Yenni (Jenny) brewery on Buhaiivka, which had once been Anselm's and later Enni's, was no longer operating.
Beerhalls: Where People Drank Beer in Odesa
Brewing was only half the story; consuming beer in public was the other. Odesa had its bierhals—beer halls translated directly from German (Bierhalle) or English (Beer Hall). These were social spaces as much as drinking places. Tyrolean or German music often filled the rooms, the crowd was mixed and lively, and the atmosphere could range from genteel to raucous.
The bar in a beerhouse in Odesa in the 1910s
Bruns's beer hall—tucked in the courtyard between Derybasivska and Lanzheronivska Streets—was a favorite haunt of writers and poets. Beer halls were not exclusively male domains; women attended as well, and in many cases these establishments looked and felt much like restaurants, with the key difference that the menu centered on beer.
Writer Alexander Kuprin gave one vivid portrait of the humbler pubs in and around the port. His story Gambrinus is set in such a tavern: a dark, seedier hangout where dockworkers, sailors, fishermen and other rough customers gathered—a portrait of Odesa's working-class nightlife where a Jewish violinist becomes a tragic figure caught in the gears of the 1905–1907 revolution.
Not all beer culture was gritty. The advertising of the Yenny company painted a very different picture: A well-dressed woman enjoying beer at the Petersburg Hotel and taking in the view of Prymorskyi Boulevard below. The contrast between colorful ads and back-room taverns speaks to how beer was marketed to different publics—sometimes rowdy, sometimes urbane.
Yenny advert featuring a lovely view of the port
Beer halls could be decorative, too. At the end of the 19th century, one such hall—later absorbed into the Odesa Art Museum—featured a large mural celebrating the pleasures of beer. That establishment, nicknamed the "Yellow Giants," was commissioned by Friedrich Jenny and stands as an example of how beer culture in Odesa could cross over into the civic and artistic realm.
Advertisements featuring the First-Bessarabian Beer and Honey Brewery Bohemia (right side) from the Odessa Directory, 1899.
During the NEP, many of the grand beer halls were nationalized and converted into state-run "food trust" beer halls—a transformation in style and ownership that left a different legacy. Advertising continued, of course: the 1920s saw posters urging citizens to "Drink Tip-Top Beer," a sign that, even in changing political climates, beer remained a lively part of urban culture.
"Drink Tip-Top Beer," an advertisement from the NEP period, 1920s.
That, in essence, is Odesa's beer story in the 19th and early 20th centuries: a latecomer to the region's fermented traditions that nonetheless grew fast thanks to port trade, immigrant expertise, entrepreneurial ambition, and a local appetite for public drinking places that combined the conviviality of restaurants with the straightforward pleasure of beer. From Abaza's lease in 1843 to Sanzenbacher and Jenny's factories, and from the bustling port importers to the intimate bierhals of Derybasivska, the city brewed a culture as much as it brewed beer.
And to learn how the spirit lives on today in the local brew scene, click here.
