Cieszyn

The brewery was established on Castle Hill by Archduke Albrecht Friedrich Habsburg and has operated without interruption for over 175 years. It describes itself as a living museum of brewing, a claim grounded in its continued use of open fermentation tanks, a technique that involves leaving the fermenting beer exposed to the air rather than sealed in a pressurised vessel, and which is now rare in contemporary industrial brewing. The 19th-century architecture on Castle Hill remains in active use, giving the site an unusual continuity between heritage and production.

The AF lager, launched in 2020, is produced using a specialised yeast strain that naturally limits alcohol production during fermentation, rather than removing alcohol from a finished beer afterwards. That second approach, known as dealcoholisation, involves brewing a beer to full strength and then extracting the alcohol; the Cieszyn AF lager instead relies on the yeast doing the limiting work from the start, placing it in a smaller category of fermentation-controlled alcohol-free beers.

In 2020, Grupa Żywiec, the Heineken-owned group that had held the brewery for many years, sold its full stake to Felix Investments, returning Browar Zamkowy Cieszyn to independent ownership. The sale coincided with the brewery's first move into the alcohol-free market. The broader range includes traditional lagers, porters, and craft-oriented IPAs and sours, with the AF lager as the entry point for alcohol-free drinkers within an otherwise primarily alcoholic portfolio.

Distribution of the AF lager outside Poland is through specialist alcohol-free retailers. For sober-curious drinkers who want an AF option with genuine brewing heritage behind it rather than a brand built specifically for the no-alcohol market, that provenance is a meaningful differentiator.