Luxembourg: Luxembourg pubs may soon be able to expand their beer offer beyond standard pils

Luxembourg’s rigid conditions forcing pubs to carry only one brewery’s brands may open a crack in coming months, allowing craft beer fans the option of a cloudy IPA or other artisanal style beyond their standard pils, Luxembourg Times reported on August 4.

The country’s largest brewery, Brasserie Nationale de Luxembourg, is going on record telling bar operators dependent on selling its Bofferding and Battin brews that they can also offer products from smaller Luxembourg craft brewers without violating their exclusivity contracts.

Those contracts are serious business for pub operators in a country where different units of the country’s biggest brewer and runner-up Diekirch not only supply their primary product but also may own the bar’s premises and the alcohol licence needed to operate.

“The customer now has at least a little more choice in a bar,” said Joël Back, co-founder of the Twisted Cat beer brewery. Nearly two dozen bars have started selling its beers since the Confédération des Brasseries et des Brasseurs du Luxembourg (CBBL) sent a statement about an agreement quietly reached two years ago with Brasserie Nationale, allowing the bars controlled through exclusive contracts to sell specialty beers by other CBBL members.

The confederation also includes the makers of Twisted Cat, Clausel, Heischter, and Hinkelsbaacher, as well as labels too small to own their own production equipment. Brasserie de Luxembourg Mousel-Diekirch and Brasserie Simon are not members.

Though the deal dates back two years, Brasserie Nationale hasn’t exactly promoted the fact that pub operators tied by contract to selling the brewery’s products can also sell bottles of one other specialty beer, said Georges Lentz, the tenth generation, family-owned company’s managing director.

“We don’t have regular contact with our tenants unless there is a problem, unless there is difficulty or unless they don’t pay,” Lentz said in an interview. “If they ever call us up and they say, ‘May I do it?’ we say, ‘yeah, sure,’. We’re checking out if it’s a member of the federation and if it’s a specialty beer that’s not going to be in direct competition with our beer.”

Limited access for Luxembourg beer upstarts to bars displaying the Bofferding and Battin brands may be because operators use the exclusivity contracts as an excuse not to carry brands they don’t want anyway, Lentz said.

“Very often, the tenant, when one of the sales reps from Twisted Cat, for example, tries to sell the beer to the bar, you know what the tenants say? ‘Well, no, I would love to but the brewery forbids us to do that,’ “ Lentz said. “That is because they don’t want to get that product. They’re not interested in having that type of product in their bar.”

Beer rival and fellow CBBL member Edmond Libens doubts that Bofferding and Battin bars will suddenly start offering consumers any noticeable new choices.

“I think Brasserie Nationale is trying to show goodwill with this gesture to open its doors to small breweries. However, the salespeople, who are paid based on their performance, are going against their management’s promise,” said Libens, director of the family-owned Lëtzebuerger Stad Brauerei, which makes Clausel beers.

“It will never change unless the government will change something” about the licenses that lock pub operators into exclusive contracts, Libens said in an interview. “It would be much easier for the small breweries or the competitors from abroad, but [Bofferding and Diekirch] don’t want it.”

He would not say whether the three establishments Clausel operates near its Clausen brewery now will offer the products of fellow CBBL members, though Libens said many outside brands are offered in bottles.

“We only have three establishments with our beers, and to survive, we don’t have much choice. We need to sell as many of our Clausel beers as possible,” Libens said.

The makers of Heichter and Hinkelsbaacher, even smaller players among what national statistics agency Statec listed as eight domestic brewers in 2024, did not respond to questions about the CBBL pact.

Broader options may actually expand the customer base of bars that have long been locked into stocking only one brewery’s products and the traditional pilsner style, said Twisted Cat’s Back.

“I don’t think that they’re losing anything. They’re gaining because that bar that has two or three different beers will have more people in. The same people will drink pils, but new people will drink craft beer,” he said during an interview outside the company’s Dudelange brewery, tasting room and restaurant Kantin, which carries brews from Bofferding and other CBBL members.

Nine out of ten Luxembourg bar or café patrons are with friends when they visit, while 71% say they will enter with a partner, according to survey results released two weeks ago by the research firm Ilres for the Economy Ministry and industry federation Horesca.

“Never have we been allowed to sell any liquid into any Diekirch bar. Never,” Back said. “They were very harsh about this. I know that one of the commercial guys from Diekirch once said to a bar in the city, ‘You get all these Luxembourgish craft beers out of your fridge or we’re going to just change the tenant without any problem.’ “

Diekirch has been owned since 2002 by Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest beer company. The Belgium-based giant did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Besides already controlling the vast bulk of Luxembourg beer sales, the country’s two major breweries also hold about a third of the nearly 3,300 bar licences existing in 2022, but 40% of the alcohol licenses in active use, according to Finance Ministry responses to a series of parliamentary questions about the local beer industry in the past three years.

“Once owned by a company, the licenses can be freely rented out on the market. However, the rule has the perverse effect of allowing certain companies to secure a lucrative quasi-monopoly over decades by hoarding bar licenses in droves,” Pirate party lawmaker Marc Goergen wrote in a parliamentary question in September 2023. “This rule deters many people from becoming self-employed, because leasing the concessions costs a lot of money and cafés are usually told by the wholesaler who owns the license which products they can sell.”

Luxembourg’s Customs and Excise Administration, which tracks the licenses, do not know how many pub operators have an exclusivity clause in their contract requiring them to sell only the beers of the brewery owning their license, Finance Minister Gilles Roth said in one response in May.

The number of licenses - rationed out in proportion to the population of a municipality - exceeds the nearly 970 active pubs, cafés and bistros in Luxembourg, which according to hospitality industry lobby group Horesca have declined by 23% since 2017.

The CBBL announcement came as Brasserie Nationale was under examination by EU competition authorities.

Diekirch owner AB InBev had opposed allowing Brasserie Nationale’s drinks distribution unit Munhowen to buy out its largest competitor, Boissons Heintz. That acquisition was approved by EU competition authorities last month on the condition that Boissons Heintz operations and assets that sold to bars and restaurants are spun off to a future Munhowen competitor.

The acquisition, which had not yet closed as of last week, marked the European Commission taking the unusual step of examining a merger that involved a potentially intense local concentration but which had combined annual revenues of less than €130 million.

AB InBev generated more than €50 billion in revenues last year on global sales of nearly 500 million hectolitres, a measure representing 100 litres of beer. But only a small portion of that revenue was generated in the Grand Duchy.

Luxembourg brewers produced nearly 222,000 hectolitres in 2024, less than the previous year by 12%, according to the Customs and Excise Administration, which collects taxes on the output.

The customs production figures seem low compared to data on beer shipped abroad and information from the brewers about their production.

National statistics agency Statec does not release data about domestic beer production or sales within the country. But it describes Luxembourg producers as exporting 194,000 hectolitres last year and importing about 400,000 hectolitres per year, half of that from Belgium.

Brasserie Nationale’s output, which also includes the Funck-Bricher brand, is about 165,000 hectolitres per year, although 2024 production was below that in a bad year for the company, Lentz said.

Diekirch produced about 150,000 hectoliters per year, the Luxembourg Times’s sister newspaper Virgule reported in 2022. AB InBev did not respond to questions about the Luxembourg brewery’s current output. Back’s Twisted Cat brewery produced 1,700 hectoliters last year and aims to increase that to 2,200 this year, Back said.

05 August, 2025