The
Hungarian exiles in
Shumen, led by
Lajos Kossuth after the
Hungarian Revolution of 1848, brewed beer and are thought to have found followers among the locals. However, their stay in the city was short and they could not manage to introduce beer to the masses. The Frenchman Ducorp, who worked as a railway engineer near
Sofia between 1873 and 1876, opened a small brewery in
Knyazhevo. The
Czech Jiří Prošek, who first came to Bulgaria in 1873 to work on the same railway line, noted that the local
Shopi had the custom to brew primitive beer at
harvest time. They soaked
barley, leaving it to germinate, drying it, adding hot water and wild
hops, with natural
fermentation and cooling. Bulgaria's earliest commercial brewery was established in
Plovdiv by the
German Swiss Rudolf Frick and Friedrich Sulzer in 1876. It became a large and modern factory in 1879–1881 with the help of another Swiss expert, Christian August Bomanti. Production began in 1882 in the Kamenitsa area near the city and continues today, its successor being the
Kamenitza brewery. The first brewery in
Varna dates back to 1884, when the contractors Kasabov and Vtichev opened up a small factory. The professional Czech brewer Franz-František Milde established the
Shumensko beer factory in
Shumen in 1882, and helped found the Bulgarian Brewing Association the same year. Jiří Prošek and his brothers founded the
Vitosha brewery in Sofia in 1884; they also bought Ducorp's small brewery and owned the Dalbok Zimnik cellar. Today, the Vitosha brewery is known as
Ariana. In 1899, Milde's Bulgarian partners tried to deceive him, so he bought the
Austrian Johann Habermann's brewery in
Rousse (established in 1876) and started producing beer there. Fearing his competition, his partners quickly paid their debts and Milde returned to Shumen, leaving his brother Sebastian as the Rousse factory's manager. In the late 19th and early 20th century, beer rapidly grew in popularity among the Bulgarian
middle class, and a large number of beer houses were established in most big cities. After
World War I, there were already 18 breweries in Bulgaria. Besides those already mentioned, these included the
Stara Zagora factory of Dr. Kozhuharov (since 1902), the Czechs Malotin and Hozman's factory in
Lom, the Habermann and St Petka breweries in Rousse, the German Moritz Ratt's Cherven Rak factory in
Pleven, W. Ollinger's in Koshava, others in
Veliko Tarnovo and
Gorna Oryahovitsa, etc. Following
World War II, as Bulgaria became part of the
Eastern Bloc, all breweries were nationalized. Since the democratic reforms in 1989, the Bulgarian beer market has been dominated by some of the world's largest multinational beer companies who privatized the local breweries and produce both locally and internationally branded beer. Numerous
beer festivals (
birfest) are organized yearly in the major cities all around the country, for example in Sofia, Plovdiv, Pleven,
Gabrovo,
Sevlievo,
Bansko,
Vidin, etc. The most popular form of packaging is the
glass bottle, closely followed by the
PET bottle, which, in 2008, accounted for 41% of beer packaging. Some Eastern European countries are showing a trend towards purchasing lager in large PET packs, for Bulgaria this trend is mainly confined to standard and economy brands of
pale lager. ==Economy==