In the Inn River valley, surrounded by the mountains of the Austrian Tyrol, there is a factory capable of producing an antibiotic from the initial cultivation of the fungus all the way to the box of tablets that reaches a pharmacy.
Today the plant covers more than 28 hectares, uses fermentation tanks of up to 200,000 litres and can manufacture around 240 million packs of antibiotics a year. However, long before becoming a pharmaceutical facility, that place produced something very different: beer.
The story began in Kundl, a small town in western Austria. A brewery operated there for centuries and, after the Second World War, was converted to manufacture one of the most important medicines in history.
It was not simply a case of reusing abandoned buildings. The knowledge, facilities and industrial culture developed around beer helped solve one of the major health problems of post-war Europe: producing penicillin at scale.
A brewery founded in the seventeenth century
Kundl's brewing tradition dates back to 1658, when Bartlmae Plank founded a factory that brewed the beer known locally as Kundler Bier.
The brewery even had a gallery excavated into the mountain. Its stable temperature and humidity conditions made it possible to store and mature the beer before modern industrial refrigeration systems existed.
Over the following centuries, the factory changed owners and increased its capacity. In 1929 it was acquired by the Brau AG group, but the shortage of raw materials caused by the Second World War forced brewing production to stop in 1943.
Three years later, that apparently obsolete factory found a completely new purpose.
1946: from beer to penicillin
Austria was then under Allied occupation. Europe had just emerged from the Second World War and penicillin was still a scarce, expensive medicine that was difficult to obtain.
Michel Rambaud, a chemist and French officer in the occupying forces, recognised that the old Kundl brewery had several useful characteristics for manufacturing antibiotics: tanks, pipes, temperature-control systems, water availability and, above all, experience working with microorganisms on an industrial scale.
Rambaud promoted the creation of Biochemie GmbH in the brewery's facilities. In 1946 the penicillin production project began there, and in 1948 the first ampoules left the factory.
The idea is often summarised by saying that beer fermentation and penicillin production are the same process. The reality is more interesting: they are not the same process, but they belong to the same technological family.
In both cases, a microorganism is grown in a nutrient-rich medium and variables such as temperature, pH, hygiene, time and oxygen availability are controlled. The fundamental difference lies in the organism used and in the product intended to be obtained.
What do beer and penicillin have in common?
In beer, yeasts - usually species and strains of the genus Saccharomyces- consume the sugars present in the wort and mainly generate alcohol, carbon dioxide and numerous aromatic compounds.
In penicillin production, a filamentous fungus of the genus Penicilliumis cultivated. The aim is not to produce alcohol, but to get the organism to synthesise penicillin as a secondary metabolite.
Beer fermentation
Beer production begins with a wort obtained mainly from water and malted grain. After boiling and the addition of hops, the wort is cooled and inoculated with yeast.
The yeast metabolises its fermentable sugars and produces:
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Ethanol.
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Carbon dioxide.
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Esters.
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Higher alcohols.
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Acids and other compounds that affect aroma and flavour.
Alcoholic fermentation can take place without a continuous supply of oxygen, although yeast does need oxygen during certain initial phases to grow and maintain its cell membranes correctly.
Penicillin fermentation
In Kundl, Penicillium is cultivated in closed tanks fed with water, sugars and different nutrients. Unlike alcoholic fermentation, this process needs a constant supply of sterile air.
It is, therefore, an aerobic industrial fermentation.
For several days, the following are carefully controlled:
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Temperature.
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pH.
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Pressure.
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Nutrient concentration.
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The amount of dissolved oxygen.
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Fungal growth.
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The appearance of possible contamination.
The result is a dense broth containing biomass, residual nutrients and the antibiotic generated by the fungus. In Kundl, technicians work with fermenters that reach 200,000 litres.
The old brewery could not begin producing penicillin simply by replacing yeast with a fungus. Research, new sterilisation techniques, aeration systems and chemical processes were needed to separate and purify the active ingredient.
But the infrastructure and knowledge accumulated by the brewing industry provided an exceptional foundation.
The great leap of industrial fermentation
Penicillin had been observed by Alexander Fleming in 1928, but that first research did not solve how to isolate it, preserve it and produce it in sufficient quantities.
From 1939 onwards, the team led by Howard Florey at the University of Oxford, which also included Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and other researchers, managed to purify it and demonstrate its therapeutic usefulness.
The next challenge was industrial.
During the Second World War, scientists, engineers, administrations and companies developed submerged-fermentation systems capable of cultivating Penicillium in large tanks. The use of new strains, more productive culture media and deep fermentation tanks made it possible to multiply production.
This advance did not come out of nowhere. The food industry had already spent decades learning to control microorganisms to produce beer, wine, yeast, vinegar and other fermented foods.
Breweries contributed tanks, pumps, pipes and knowledge about cleaning, temperature and microbial cultures. Pharmaceutical production added much higher levels of sterility, purification and control.
Kundl's transformation perfectly represents that meeting point between two industries.
From fermentation broth to antibiotic
When fermentation ends, the contents of the tank are still very far from resembling a medicine.
The first step is to separate the fungal biomass by filtration. The liquid is cooled quickly to reduce the degradation of penicillin, a molecule that is sensitive to certain environmental conditions.
Then the extraction of the active ingredient begins. Through different chemical operations, penicillin is isolated, purified and transformed until it reaches the necessary pharmaceutical quality.
The Kundl plant produces, among other compounds:
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Penicillin G.
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Penicillin V.
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6-aminopenicillanic acid.
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Semi-synthetic derivatives such as amoxicillin.
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Derivatives such as ampicillin.
Approximately 4,000 tonnes of active pharmaceutical ingredients leave its facilities each year, later becoming tablets, capsules or powders for preparing oral suspensions.
There is another important difference here compared with beer. In a brewery, fermentation directly generates much of the product that will be consumed. Maturation, filtration, carbonation and packaging may follow, but the beer already exists inside the fermenter.
In the pharmaceutical industry, fermentation is only the beginning. The compound produced by the microorganism must be extracted from the broth, purified, analysed and formulated with extreme precision.
Penicillin V: the discovery that came out of Kundl
The old brewery did not merely copy manufacturing processes developed in other countries. It also played a leading role in one of the most important advances in the history of antibiotics.
The first penicillins were unstable in stomach acid. For that reason, they had to be administered by injection.
In 1951, researchers Ernst Brandl and Hans Margreiter were working in Kundl trying to control contamination that appeared during fermentation. When they modified one of the compounds added to the culture, they observed that the fungus had generated a different penicillin.
The new molecule was stable in an acidic medium and could pass through the stomach without being destroyed. It was phenoxymethylpenicillin, known as penicillin V.
The finding made it possible to develop a penicillin that could be administered orally in tablet form. The patent was filed in 1952 and the medicine began to be marketed shortly afterwards.
Taking an antibiotic at home became much easier than receiving several injections. That improvement greatly expanded access to treatment and turned Biochemie Kundl into an internationally relevant pharmaceutical company.
In 1963, Sandoz acquired the company. Decades later, after the creation of Novartis and the later separation of its generics business, the factory became part of today's Sandoz.
The old brewery is now a strategic facility
The modern factory preserves little of the seventeenth-century brewery. The site covers more than 28 hectares and employs around 2,500 people.
Its importance does not depend only on its size. Kundl is one of the few Western facilities that keeps the entire penicillin production chain integrated: it ferments the microorganism, obtains the active ingredient and manufactures the finished medicine within the same complex.
The plant produces around 200,000 tonnes of fermentation broth a year. Its finished-product manufacturing capacity has risen to approximately 240 million packs annually and, according to the company, could cover the antibiotic needs of European patients.
A story that began with beer tanks has thus become a matter of industrial autonomy for Europe.
Why Europe is looking back to Kundl
Over recent decades, much of the world's manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients has shifted to Asia. China and India occupy central positions in the supply chains for generic medicines and antibiotics.
This concentration allows production at reduced prices, but it also creates dependence. The temporary closure of a plant, a trade conflict, a quality problem or a logistics interruption can affect the supply of several countries at the same time.
The European Medicines Agency maintains a list of critical medicines whose availability is considered a priority in order to avoid serious harm to patients and ensure the functioning of health systems. That list helps identify possible vulnerabilities and apply preventive measures against shortages.
In March 2025, the European Commission also presented its proposal for a Critical Medicines Act. Its objectives include facilitating strategic industrial projects, introducing security-of-supply criteria into public procurement and reducing dependence on a single country or supplier.
The Kundl factory fits directly into that debate. Maintaining the capacity to produce penicillin within Europe is not only a business matter. It is a way of preserving knowledge, facilities and specialised personnel that would be very difficult to recover after disappearing.
The problem is not only producing more antibiotics
The existence of a large European factory does not by itself solve all the problems related to antibiotics.
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria evolve and stop responding to the medicines designed to fight them. The unnecessary or incorrect use of antibiotics accelerates the selection of resistant microorganisms.
According to the data collected in the article that gave rise to this research, multidrug-resistant bacteria cause around 35,000 deaths each year in Europe and generate about 1.5 billion euros in additional healthcare costs.
For that reason, the challenge has two apparently contradictory sides:
Europe needs stable and sufficient antibiotic production, but at the same time it must prevent them from being used when they are not necessary.
Industrial pollution is also part of the problem. If a factory's wastewater contains antibiotic residues, bacteria present in the environment may be exposed to them and the emergence of resistance may be favoured.
In Kundl, advanced wastewater treatment systems are used to reduce the release of pharmaceutical residues. It is a less visible aspect than the enormous fermenters, but essential for responsible production.
Beer as a precursor to modern biotechnology
The relationship between beer and penicillin does not mean that a drink contains antibiotics or that brewing yeasts can produce penicillin.
The connection is technological.
Long before understanding the existence of microorganisms, human societies were already using fermentation to transform food. With the development of microbiology in the nineteenth century, those artisanal processes began to become scientifically controlled industries.
Breweries learned to:
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Maintain stable microbial cultures.
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Control fermentation temperatures.
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Clean and disinfect tanks.
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Transfer liquids without contaminating them.
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Work with large quantities of grain and sugar.
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Repeat a biological process with consistent results.
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Detect deviations through aroma, flavour and analysis.
Much of later industrial biotechnology was built on these principles.
Today's fermenters make it possible to produce medicines, enzymes, vitamins, amino acids, proteins, fuels and foods. The microorganisms, nutrients and final products change, but the same fundamental idea remains: creating the right conditions for a cell to carry out a useful transformation.
Beer was one of the first demonstrations that microorganisms could work for us, even thousands of years before we knew they existed.
What a brewery teaches about innovation
Kundl also offers a lesson in the reuse of industrial knowledge.
The old factory was not valuable only because it had available space. It was valuable because its workers, facilities and previous activity were related to fermentation.
A brewery is, in essence, a food biotechnology plant. It works with strains of microorganisms, culture media, times, temperatures and cleaning processes. A small deviation can completely change the result.
That level of precision is also present in contemporary craft beer.
Two beers brewed with the same malt and hop varieties can turn out very differently if the following change:
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The yeast strain.
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Fermentation temperature.
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Water composition.
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The moment the hops are added.
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Oxygen exposure.
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Fermenter pressure.
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Maturation time.
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Storage conditions.
The story of Kundl takes this idea to an extraordinary scale. The same general principle that transforms wort into a Lager, an IPA or a Stout can be used, with other microorganisms and completely different processes, to produce molecules capable of fighting infections.
From beer tanks to 240 million medicines
The old Kundl brewery stopped producing beer in 1943. Eighty years later, the place still depends on sugars, microorganisms, tanks, temperature and time.
Yeasts are no longer cultivated to produce alcohol and aromas. Instead, Penicillium is cultivated to obtain penicillins and derivatives such as amoxicillin.
The transformation shows how far knowledge developed around fermentation can go. A technology associated for millennia with making food and drink ended up being decisive in manufacturing one of the medicines that changed human history.
Beer did not invent penicillin. But breweries helped create the industrial language that made it possible to produce it.
Frequently asked questions about beer and penicillin
Is penicillin made with brewer's yeast?
No. Beer is fermented mainly with yeasts of the genus Saccharomyces. Penicillin is obtained by cultivating fungi of the genus Penicillium. They are different microorganisms and different processes.
Does beer contain penicillin?
No. A properly brewed beer does not contain penicillin. The fact that both products are obtained through fermentation processes does not mean that they share their components.
Why was a brewery used to make penicillin?
Breweries already had tanks, pipes, water, temperature-control systems and experience working with microorganisms. These conditions made adaptation to pharmaceutical fermentation easier.
Where is the old brewery located?
It is located in Kundl, a town in the Austrian Tyrol. Today the site belongs to Sandoz and remains dedicated to manufacturing antibiotics.
What is the difference between beer fermentation and penicillin fermentation?
In beer, yeasts mainly transform sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. In penicillin production, a fungus grows in an aerated medium and synthesises the antibiotic as a secondary metabolite.
What was penicillin V?
It was a penicillin stable in stomach acid, developed in Kundl in the early 1950s. It made it possible to administer the antibiotic orally instead of relying exclusively on injections.
Sources consulted
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Report on the Sandoz plant in Kundl, its brewing origin, industrial capacity and relevance to European supply.
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History of Kundl and its old brewery, founded in 1658.
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History of penicillin research and industrial production.
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History of penicillin V and its development at Biochemie Kundl.
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European Commission: Critical Medicines Act and measures to strengthen supply chains.
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European Medicines Agency: European list of critical medicines.
