Maisel & Friends Is Launched

In 2012, Jeff Maisel created Maisel & Friends with close friends in Bayreuth, Bavaria, launching it as the contemporary specialty-beer and craft-beer brand of Brauerei Gebr. Maisel. The project introduced creative interpretations of international beer styles alongside the established family brewery’s portfolio. Its range came to include pale ale, IPA, bock, stout-inspired beers, and other modern styles, and the brewery presented the brand as an expression of beer diversity, experimentation, and friendship. Maisel & Friends grew from a family brewing business founded by the brothers Hans and Eberhardt Maisel in Bayreuth in 1887 and led by Jeff Maisel in the family’s fourth generation. The brewery emphasizes that creative and complex beers can be made from the four ingredients permitted by the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot. Maisel & Friends became an early brewery-led participant in Germany’s modern craft-beer movement, linking an established regional brewery with the changing beer culture of the 2010s. The physical beer-experience destination developed later. In 2016, the opening of Maisel’s Bier-Erlebnis-Welt and the Liebesbier restaurant expanded the Bayreuth site with gastronomy, a brewing workshop, tastings, a beer shop, and beers from other creative breweries. This later development built on the Maisel & Friends brand launched four years earlier.