When JC Jacobsen decided to build a new brewery outside the city, one reason would have been a need for more space to expand the business …. his first brewery was in a courtyard in Brolæggerstræde - close to Nytorv in the centre of Copenhagen - in a property that had been purchased by his father in 1826.

However, he must also have been concerned about finding a clean and consistent source of fresh water and for ways to discard the waste from the brewing process - not easy in the densely packed streets of the old city.

By 1847, Jacobsen had found what we would call now a greenfield site nearly 3 kilometres outside the city and built his new brewery there, alongside a new railway so, then, his next problem must surely have been finding men prepared to go that far out of the city to work. The story of Carlsberg is an important example that shows how Danish manufacturers moved production and labour from small urban workshops to new and rapidly expanding and rapidly developing factories outside the city.

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JC Jacobsen opened his new brewery in 1847 on an open site outside the city and alongside the new railway from Copenhagen to Roskilde that was finished that same year - detail from a map of 1860

The site of the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen is not just large - by 2008, when brewing here ended, the brewery covered some 33 hectares - but it is also a complicated industrial site that evolved over a period of 150 years as both the technology of brewing on a large scale - so brewing on a truly industrial scale - developed and as the company expanded.

The basic story might appear to be fairly straightforward: a new brewery was established here in 1847 and brewing continued on the site until 2008 but this is not simply the story of a brewery. For a start, there were three separate breweries here.

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